What’s going on with Billy Moore?

Billy Moore isn’t happy. He’s trying to get to the gym, but has a demanding toddler running around and a Shih Tzu with “a lump on its arse” that needs to be taken the vet. He’s also had to phone me, because I’ve been contacting figures associated with the far-right, conspiratorial or anti-immigrant wing of online content creation and asking them if they now consider Billy one of their own. 

“Charlie and Liam sent me your emails,” he says in a Scouse accent only sharpened during years living abroad. He means Charlie Veitch, the YouTube provocateur whose run-ins with drug addicts and the homeless have made him a controversial figure across the North West, and Liam Tuffs, the ex-offender whose The Dozen podcast Billy recently appeared on. “First off, I’m not an ‘auditor’...” 

He says the word like I’d accused him of being something filthy or perverted. Auditing, according to Hope Not Hate, is a growing trend on the far-right. They’re a kind of influencer, typically presenting themselves as citizen journalists exposing the asylum system.

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Moore is like the Scarlet Pimpernel of Britain's social fractures. Just in the last few months, he’s popped up in Bradford, Rotherham, Blackburn and Rhyl, broadcasting to his 412,000 subscribers. This makes him, in all likelihood, Liverpool’s journalist with the best hustle and the biggest reach, “citizen” or otherwise. Often he’s at demonstrations, because “that’s where the action is.” 

Pushing the boat out, he has this week been to Calais and Dunkirk “to see what it’s all about.” While most Scouse influencers were seemingly at the opening of Crabbish on Duke Street, photos and videos of Moore half-submerged in the English Channel appeared. They feature wretched families in hoodies, parkas and life-jackets wading waist-deep through the water, presumably towards a dinghy that will ferry them across to Dover. His captions rage against “alpha males” abandoning their families right there on the Côte d’Opale. 

“What happened to women and children first?” he asks in a subsequent video, unknowingly echoing a man who lectured me on “the Birkenhead drill” outside a migrant hotel last year. And yet, Billy rejects the auditor label — or even a definite “right-wing” characterisation. 

“I never knew anything about ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’,” he tells me on the phone. That all changed, he says, on 29 July 2024 — when Axel Rudakubana murdered three little girls in a frenzied stabbing in Southport.