On 2 February 2020, at around 9.45am, Nigel Farage arrived at the LBC studios in Leicester Square to host his Sunday phone-in show. It was a year before the Brexit Party would be renamed Reform UK, and it was polling at around 2%. The show did not go smoothly.
At 10.55am, he received a call from “Barry”, who had already been pre-interviewed by the station’s producers. During that conversation, Barry explained that he was an expat living in Spain who had opposed Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. The producers, hopeful that he would politely clash with Farage, patched him through.
But the conversation quickly took a strange turn.
Barry, it transpired, was not who he said he was — and he had a message for the country’s “immigrant community”. Down the line, he informed Farage in a thick Scouse accent: “I’ll be taking my two 11-year-old daughters and I’ll be moving directly to the centre of Rotherham, just to let [the immigrants] know we’re willing to sacrifice our children on the altar of multiculturalism.”
Farage, caught unaware, abruptly ended the call, saying: “Barry, I’ve had enough of this.” He then explained to his listeners that the conversation “was not very helpful or constructive or sensible at all”, and moved on to the next call. Normal service resumed.
For Barry, however, his brief minute of fame represented a small victory. Unknown to Farage or his team of producers, he was not a lone troll. He was part of a coordinated movement known as the “Groypers”, seeking to shift British politics rightward.
At its most basic, Groyping is a gamified form of far-right trolling. Originating in the United States in 2017, it is loosely organised around the Great Replacement Theory, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims “the Jews” are orchestrating the demographic replacement of white populations in Europe and the US through immigration.
On the messaging app Telegram, where “Operation Groyp Farage” had been planned, Barry had instructed his fellow Groypers to phone Farage’s show, pretend to be on “the Left”, and tell him that “you wish to see a white minority in ALL UK towns and cities”. Barry believed that these calls were raising awareness of a coming “white genocide”. For him, the stakes could not be higher.
In America, the Groyping movement is most closely associated with the livestreamer Nick Fuentes, whose online followers have spent nearly a decade targeting right-wing activists they consider too moderate. Less well-known is that, for a brief period in 2020, the same tactics took hold in Britain. In a handful of Telegram chats and channels, each with hundreds of members, participants like Barry coordinated attempts to infiltrate phone-in radio shows. Their aim was simple: pass the producer’s screening call, get on air, and use the platform to introduce extremist talking points into mainstream conversation.
For a time, they succeeded. Dozens of calls slipped through on stations such as LBC and TalkRadio, catching hosts off guard. But apart from producers and attentive listeners, few noticed, and the incidents were soon forgotten.
Then, in February this year, the group chats stirred back to life. The call went out to Britain’s Groypers to resume their Groyping. This time, however, the target was not radio hosts. It was more specific: Reform UK.
Who are the British Groypers? How do they operate? And what does their re-emergence reveal about the state of the British Right? I have spoken to British Groypers past and present, as well as those on the receiving end of their campaigns. What emerges is not just a portrait of a movement steeped in irony and grievance, but one that seems intent on fracturing the British Right.
In America, Groyping reached its apogee in 2019, when Nick Fuentes led his online army offline and into what became known as the Groyper War. Their principal target was the influential Trump ally Charlie Kirk, whom Fuentes dismissed as insufficiently radical.
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