Thomas Corbett-Dillon

Craig Dillon (right) and Thomas Corbett-Dillon (far-right) pictured together in 2019

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This article is about the wannabe right-wing political pundit Thomas Corbett-Dillon. For the digital content producer and former YouTuber Craig Dillon keep reading because they are the same person, although he may not want this widely known.

“” It's chaos, Tucker... The short of the story is that we elected Boris to be the British Trump. You know, he was going to shake up the system. He was going to deliver Brexit. He was going to stick it to the elites, but he very quickly got sucked in by the sort of globalist agenda. You know, he spent a lot of time sucking up to Macron and Merkel that he forgot he's a conservative. As you said, he went very hard on lockdown, very hard on vaccines. He became woke and then he fully signed up to this Greta Thunberg idea of the world is ending, which is not what the conservative people voted for.

—Thomas Corbett-Dillon, Tucker Carlson Tonight, July 7, 2022

Craig Thomas Dillon (1992–) also known as Thomas Corbett-Dillon is a British former YouTube star, the founder and CEO of the defunct video production company Westminster Digital and the wannabe right-wing political pundit who went viral in a clip from a July 7, 2022, episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, in which he made the ludicrously misleading claim that the then recently dethroned British PM Boris Johnson had been forced out of office for becoming “too woke” and not being the “British Trump” he had been elected to be.

YouTube beginnings and endings

“” Yes, I’m one of those annoying YouTube guys, posting videos about random stuff and being watched by thousands every week, but on a cold Sunday night last November, my world changed.

—Craig Dillon, Gay Times, October 11, 2015

While studying TV production first at the Colchester Institute and later at the University of Westminster, Craig Dillon launched a successful YouTube channel with 50,000 subscribers and over one million views of his pranks, challenges and lifestyle tips. It was at this time that, according to a 2014 investigation by TenEighty, a Thomas Corbett, claiming to represent YouTube management, but using an email domain registered to Dillon, first appears emailing promoters with requests for Dillon to be granted backstage passes and celebrity interviews, in an action which TenEighty concludes may have contravened the Fraud Act 2006.

Thomas Corbett next appeared, according to the TenEighty investigation, during a police investigation into criminal allegations against Dillon, which was dropped after six-months due to lack of evidence. Corbett claiming, from the same email domain as before, to be a legal representative for Craig Dillon is reported to have threatened defamation action against those that had made and those that had reported upon the accusations that had ended his YouTube career. TenEighty speculates that, as no record of Corbett was to be found on the Law Society’s public record of registered legal practitioners, the Solicitors Act 1974 may have been violated. Dillon's response to TenEighty was that Corbett was infact a relative who worked with him.

With his dreams of being the next Graham Norton seemingly scuppered, Dillon instead found gainful employment as a digital producer for Sky News, which proved to be a stepping stone to his next big media venture.

Digikids in the halls of Westminster

Craig Dillon founded video production company Westminster Digital in November 2017. Nicknamed Digikids of Westminster by the British tabloids, the company specialised in the production of short Facebook promo-videos highlighting Tory MPs concerns about local issues.

According to a 2021 investigation by the Daily Mirror up to fifty MPs paid the Digikids around £165,000 (including £4000 from policing minister Kit Malthouse for his hit podcast The Maltcast) of UK tax payers money for their work around the 2019 Tory leadership competition and subsequent 2019 United Kingdom general election. Among the Digikids many clients at this time was the eventual winner of both those contests, Boris Johnson, who Dillon advised to "keep quiet". This apparently qualifies Dillon to be introduced as a former advisor to Johnson for all his subsequent political punditry.

In January 2020, Dillon became one of the first people in the UK to be tested for Covid-19, after dosing himself up and hanging around outside in a t-shirt, so the symptoms of an infection he says he knew could be the coronavirus, would not be detected by airport health checks and delay his return to London from Australia via China. Sadly, his apparent ambition of being the next Typhoid Mary was thwarted when the results came back negative.

Despite moving to the US during the pandemic, Dillon went on to provide social media and video services for Penny Mordaunt's failed 2022 Tory leadership campaign but was, according to The Times, forced out following accusations of astroturfing and a distracting appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight under the pseudonym Thomas Corbett-Dillon. At this time Dillon's UK-based co-director resigned from the company.

Incredible scenes on Tucker Carlson Tonight

“” He so humiliated himself and, without offence to you, your country I think, that you almost feel like there was something else going on here. Why would he have been sucked in to the most conventional dumb kind of lifestyle liberalism when he's obviously a very smart guy?

—Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson Tonight, July 7, 2022

“” So it's a shame because he had a lot of potential. We were very excited when he, er, you know he had everything, he even had the hair like Trump. But it just didn't come through in the end.

—Thomas Corbett-Dillon, Tucker Carlson Tonight, July 7, 2022

In a star making turn on the July 7, 2022, Tucker Carlson Tonight episode, explaining to the slack-jawed host the reasons for recently ousted British PM Boris Johnson's resignation, Craig Dillon, appearing as Thomas Corbett-Dillon, managed to dog-whistle a whole slew of right-wing talking points, including globalism, anti-lockdown, anti-vaxx, climate change denial, and, of course, wokeness, whilst carelessly failing to make any mention of either the Partygate or Pincher scandals, which most lesser pundits had assumed responsible for the bumbling PM's final downfall. A performance described by BoingBoing's Rob Beschizza as being akin to "AI-generated gibberish trained on a corpus of downvoted reddit comments," and "so completely divorced from reality that maybe, just maybe, it will offer a 'zen stick' moment to someone, somewhere who hasn't realized this is how Fox News reports on everything."

Corbett-Dillon’s appearance was picked up by Beschizza and other media commentators after being shared to Twitter by parody account Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) as an example of how misleading Fox News could be. And prompted commentary and mockery in a number of quote tweets reproduced in The Independent.

• “My god. And I always wonder why British people get sucked into this nonsense. Yes people say all kinds of rubbish, but this level of conspiratorial fantasy is so completely jarring with what’s acceptable on TV in the UK,” by ABC News foreign correspondent James Longman (@JamesAALongman)
• “Just going on telly to say a million made up things,” by Liverpool Echo editor Liam Thorp (@LiamThorpECHO).
• “Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson simply fell into a vat of elites and became woke, so he had to go. Incredible scenes,” by Den of Geek editor Cardinal Copium (@emotionalpedant).
• “Reading through the quote tweets, I take it this level of fake news is not allowed in the UK… even though it’s the base of the Murdoch empire. Something to think about…” by film director Lexi Alexander.

Corbett-Dillon’s own Twitter account was, curiously, no longer visible by the time of The Independent's reporting.

A million made up things

Dillon continues to appear under the name Corbett-Dillon on Twitter and other right-wing news outlets putting forward bad takes on a variety of subjects.

Trumpety Trump. Trump! Trump! Trump!

Corbett-Dillon, who describes himself as a monarchist, believes that, "everyone's starting to come around and saying maybe monarchy is not too bad of a system," and that there's only one who could fill the "golden shoes," stating:

I do believe that a monarchy is the best system, which is why I'm putting forward that we should have a king of America. And I think it's got to be Donald Trump.

Appealing to his intended demographic, all of Corbett-Dillon's analysis is seemingly brought back to Donald Trump with the former president's fellow right-wing populists Boris Johnson and Giorgia Meloni refered to as being elected to be the British Trump and Italian Trump respectively, and criticised for, in his view, not having put their countries first.

A new world order

“”The people want something different to the globalists, so they are working behind the scenes to control the people.

—Thomas Corbett-Dillon, Fox News, Febuary 17, 2024

Playing into WEF conspiracy theories, Corbett-Dillon blames the perceived failures of conservative political leaders such as Johnson and his Tory party successors in the UK, Meloni in Italy, and Leo Varadkar in Ireland on their abandoning of right-wing policy in order to jump into bed with the globalists.

White genocide

Stoking fears of white genocide and The Great Replacement, Corbett-Dillon criticizes the Tory party in the UK, Meloni in Italy, and Varadkar in Ireland for failing to deal with what he refers to as an immigration crisis. "Europe is struggling," he told Fox News, and, "Flooding the continent with people who will take more out of the system than they put in will only make the European crisis worse." "The European appetite for accepting refugees is over," he continued, "particularly Muslims who have failed to assimilate into our culture."

He even produced his own version of "the mantra" with a tweet reading:

Asia is for Asian People ✅
Africa is for Black People ✅
Europe is for White People 👮🏻‍♂️
— Thomas Corbett-Dillon, March 2, 2024.

He has also criticised the dispatching of Royal Navy to save the lives of immigrants who run into trouble crossing the English Channel.

Transphobia

Tapping into transphobia, because that's popular, right?, Corbett-Dillon misgendered Dylan Mulvaney in a March 13, 2024 tweet, in which he called for her to be banned from society and committed to a mental asylum.