Archived posts from two separate deleted social media accounts belonging to Robert Kenyon – Reform UK’s candidate for the Makerfield byelection against Andy Burnham on 18 June – have been published by Byline Times and Hope Not Hate, revealing a sustained pattern of riot disinformation during the Southport murders, false claims about local crime and immigration, COVID conspiracy theories, the objectification of women, and explicit calls for violence including waterboarding and hanging.
Kenyon, a Wigan councillor for Bryn with Ashton-in-Makerfield North, had his first X account – @Makerfield_RFK – suspended shortly after he was announced as Reform’s candidate earlier this week. The account’s 419 archived tweets have been analysed by Byline Times. A second deleted account has been uncovered by Hope Not Hate. The findings from both investigations are reported below.
The 2024 election campaign – the immigration filter
Byline Times’ analysis of Kenyon’s 419 archived tweets from the campaign period shows that virtually every piece of political communication he encountered was passed through an immigration filter, regardless of its subject matter.
When Labour posted a campaign image of four silhouetted figures standing on a beach at sunset with the words “Change will only happen if you vote for it,” Kenyon replied: “Was this photo taken at Calais?” There is nothing in the image referencing migrants, the Channel, or Calais. The figures are in silhouette against a sunset. The insinuation – that dark silhouetted figures on a beach must be Channel migrants – is the visual grammar of far-right replacement content.
When David Lammy posted about Labour’s foreign policy platform, Kenyon’s reply had nothing to do with foreign policy: “If Labour wins the election say goodbye to your Greenbelt and hello to millions of new migrants to the Country.” When Yvette Cooper posted about Labour’s Border Security Command, Kenyon replied: “What about the ones that slip through Yvette? Will they get to choose their carpets for their new social housing?” His standalone campaign pitch was direct: “Labour will fling open the doors even further to mass immigration, don’t let them, you can stop them by voting Reform UK.”
Before Southport – and a local stabbing he misrepresented
The mechanism Kenyon deployed nationally during the Southport riots was already operating locally weeks before the attack.
On 18 July 2024, Wigan Council posted about a violent incident on Market Street in Wigan town centre. Two men had been arrested. Kenyon replied to both the council and Greater Manchester Police simultaneously: “Stop voting Labour folks if you want this to stop” and “Stop allowing HMOs in Wigan!!!!!”
Two days later, GMP charged a 19-year-old Wigan resident – Esmaeel Mohamed of Avon Road, Norley – with robbery, Section 18 wounding, burglary, possession of a bladed article and affray. Mohamed later pleaded guilty at Bolton Crown Court and was jailed for six years. The police officer who tackled him while he was still armed, Sergeant Carl Beck, received a national bravery award.
There is nothing in the charging notice, court record or any subsequent reporting to suggest Mohamed was an asylum seeker, a hotel resident or an illegal immigrant. He was a Wigan resident who committed a serious crime, was caught, tried, convicted and imprisoned.
Kenyon replied to the police charging tweet: “The Conservatives have facilitated this alongside other big companies trying to make money from the illegal immigrant invasion. Labour won’t do anything to stop it or reverse it. Never forget that.” A local teenage stabbing, committed by a Wigan resident who would plead guilty, had been publicly reframed as evidence of an “illegal immigrant invasion” – directed at Wigan Police’s own social media account, nine days before Southport.
The Southport murders – what Kenyon posted
The Southport attack began at 11:47 BST on 29 July 2024. Three girls – Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice Aguiar – were killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Within hours, disinformation about the attacker’s identity spread across X, falsely naming him as a Muslim asylum seeker. It was that false identity that drove the first riot outside a Southport mosque the same evening.
Kenyon’s first substantive engagement came at 13:02 BST – 75 minutes after the attack, before any official information about the suspect had been released. He replied to Dan Wootton, priming the cover-up narrative: “They’ll keep the perpetrators identity quiet for as long as possible then blame mental health issues.” He invoked a Bolton murder case – a well-established far-right trope used to imply Muslim perpetrators receive media protection – before anyone outside the police knew who had committed the attack.
At 15:02, he replied to Yvette Cooper’s condolence statement: “Secure the borders, deport foreign criminals and free up prison spaces.” At 16:42, he amplified Carl Benjamin, who had linked the Southport attack to Pride policing. At 17:50 he amplified an unverified claim about migrants crossing the Channel, adding: “That is an invasion.”
At 20:18, as the first riot broke out in Southport, Kenyon sent a direct message to a comedian with a large following: “Join Reform UK, get involved, we are the only chance we have of saving this Country.” He was using the murders of three children as a recruitment pitch.
The riots – amplification and apologetics
As riots spread across England from 4 August – mobs attacking mosques, burning hotels, clashing with police in a dozen cities – Kenyon’s account became part of a coordinated amplification network.
He retweeted Elon Musk’s “#TwoTierKeir” hashtag. He amplified Musk’s question “Why aren’t all communities protected in Britain?” – which implied mosques were receiving police protection unavailable to white communities. He endorsed Carl Benjamin’s comparison of Starmer’s response to a “führerbunker.” He directed racialised footage of a Middlesbrough confrontation at Cleveland Police. When the Home Office warned that violent protesters would face the law, he replied: “Is it a hate crime for Asian men walk round in Birmingham assaulting white people en masse?”
Kenyon also provided narrative cover for a rioter caught on camera. When someone posted footage of a man being surrounded during the riots and said they would hand the video to police, Kenyon intervened: “A gang surrounds a bloke, they push him and he hits back. Then they try and play the victim, typical left.”
He continued to spread Southport conspiracy theories into October 2024, calling a Wigan Today story about a potential HMO conversion an opportunity to declare: “We don’t want any more HMOs because we know who will be put in there.”
The second account – Hope Not Hate’s findings
Separately, Hope Not Hate has identified and analysed a second deleted account belonging to Kenyon. The posts reveal additional material beyond the riot disinformation.
During the COVID pandemic, Kenyon suggested the media were “complicit” in “global tyranny” in response to a post by a far-right influencer with a history of Holocaust denial. He described vaccines as “a load of crap,” compared Australian COVID policies to Nazism and questioned whether the Canadian election of Justin Trudeau was “rigged.” When Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty urged people to get the COVID booster vaccine, Kenyon told him to “fuck right off” and told people to “take vitamins and stop having boosters.”
On climate change, Kenyon wrote that it is “a middle class problem.” In December 2021, he suggested making the conspiracy theorist Neil Oliver a government minister.
The account also contains comments about women that Hope Not Hate describes as “creepy” – including a graphic sexual comment about Carol Vorderman – and a statement that Labour are “the party for trannys.”
On 5 April 2020, Kenyon declared that someone eating chips on a beach should be “waterboarded” – a method of torture prohibited by international human rights law. Two days earlier he wrote that Richard Branson should be “hanged,” along with other businessmen, for accepting furlough money.
The context – and what Reform has said
The revelations come on top of our earlier reporting that Kenyon was previously Facebook friends with Gary Raikes, the founder of the New British Union – an organisation that advocates for a “fascist revolution” – as we reported in our original Makerfield candidate piece. His friends list was deleted after he was selected as the byelection candidate. His original X account was suspended. He has now launched a new X account which, Byline Times notes, appears to have been set up in the United States.
Reform UK has not responded to the latest revelations. Nigel Farage, who was found in Winstanley – in the Makerfield constituency – by Channel 4 this week and drove off without answering questions about his own financial arrangements, as we reported in our Channel 4 getaway piece, has also not commented.
Hope Not Hate’s conclusion is unequivocal: “Kenyon is totally unfit to represent the people of Makerfield.”
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