“As far as I am aware, he is on mainland Spain,” said Barry Armstrong, a convicted fraudster and longtime friend and benefactor of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson.

It was difficult to fit with what the staff at Robinson’s favourite breakfast place in Costa Adeje, in southern Tenerife, had said just that morning. “He was in here yesterday,” a member of the waiting staff said of Robinson.

Neither did it quite tally with Armstrong’s own Facebook postings. “Have you seen your mate we aren’t supposed to talk about on Facebook?” a friend asked of Armstrong. The response was a thumbs up emoji from the retired businessman from Newcastle.

But Armstrong, speaking by his Bentley car outside his whitewashed villa, wearing only his underpants, said he had nothing to hide.

“I did not know he is here,” Armstrong said. “Nobody’s told me that. The girl I spoke to, she said: ‘No, he’s in mainland Spain.’ Maybe when he comes out here, he might see me once, maybe twice, no more than twice.”

Tenerife was Tommy Robinson’s safe place, said Nick Lowles, a biographer of the far-right activist.

It was where he ran to in 2020 as “his life was spiralling out of control” before a very expensive libel trial over his false claims against a 15-year-old Syrian refugee.

The address he gave to court then was a 10-bedroom villa in the south of the island, described as a “private haven of prestige”.

The largest Canary island emerged again this week to be Robinson’s bolthole of choice in a moment of peril, although friends insist there was nothing untoward about the timing of his trip.

Robinson had been filmed by a fellow passenger getting on to a shuttle bus at Tenerife South airport after taking the 5.55am Ryanair flight from Stansted on Tuesday.

Mobile phone footage had spread on social media of Robinson pacing close to a prone body at London St Pancras station. He is heard telling concerned onlookers: “You saw him, he came at me.”

The Met police issued a statement saying they wished to question a 42-year-old man, understood to be Robinson, over an alleged assault the previous evening. The injured man was discharged from hospital on Wednesday.

Speaking on Friday, Armstrong said he had first met Robinson “five or six years” ago at a restaurant through “a mate of mine”.

The friend in question was Lutz Bachmann, the leader of the Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, or Pegida movement), a far-right German political organisation that hit the headlines a decade ago after its mass marches in Dresden.

Bachmann has 22 convictions in Germany, including for drug trafficking, tax evasion and child support offences.

He has called African refugees “gangs of rapists” and “throat cutters”. He was banned from entering the UK in 2018 on the grounds that his presence was “not conducive to the public good”.

Bachmann moved to Tenerife eight years ago and, with Armstrong, they appear to have formed something of a support network.

In his biography of Robinson, Lowles wrote that it was Armstrong who helped fund a campaign bus in 2019 during his failed attempt to get a seat in the European parliament.

Armstrong said the media told lies about Robinson, but then his own record is patchy.

He was convicted of printing money “in the 70s, 80s”, he confirmed. He also served two months in HMP Brixton after being convicted at Southwark crown court in 2000 for having control of counterfeit share certificates for blue chip UK companies and drafts in the name of an international bank.

“I could have appealed that and got out of it,” Armstrong said. Not that prison proved a chore. “Loved it,” he said, “made some lovely friends there. But getting back to Tommy, I swear to God I didn’t know he was here.”

Armstrong said he usually stayed in a “posh hotel” on the coast and not with him, and would work out at a gym in a shopping mall. Bachmann had not seen Robinson either, he further claimed.

“I spoke to him yesterday and he said he hadn’t,” he said. “I said: ‘Is Tommy over?’ And he said: ‘He’s not.’ He would tell me. We are mates. Then I heard from somebody else that he is on mainland Spain. It’s a mystery to me”.