Harry Redknapp: working-class hero?

“This country’s overrun. I live in Bournemouth. Bournemouth town centre has absolutely gone.”

This prompted Kyle – a Reform supporter who has supplied media training to its candidates and has hinted at running at the next general election – to share his own recent deep dive into immigration levels in the Dorset town on Rupert Murdoch’s little-watched online channel.

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“I took our nipper, I took Henry the other day, mate, you know, for his theory driving test and I’m not – there’s no part of me that’s never been honest – and I’m in Bournemouth town centre, I hadn’t been there for about four or five months and I’m just getting a coffee, I’m waiting – honestly Harry, illegal migrants up and down the street,” he said, having presumably checked the passport and visa status of everybody he saw.

“I had some friends come down the other week and said they thought we were a third-world country,” concurred Redknapp.

This meeting of minds led Laila Cunningham, Reform’s candidate for London mayor, to post it on X, writing: “Harry is a working-class hero from the East End who tells it like it is.

“Too many Londoners like him have been driven out of our great city as they’ve watched their communities change without any meaningful integration. We must put an end to this!”

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But was working-class hero Harry really driven out of London due to changing demographics? Or did the then West Ham United manager move to the Sandbanks neighbourhood of Poole, Dorset, in 2001, when he and his wife Sandra bought a mock-Tudor mansion overlooking the harbour entrance for £3 million?

They lived in the home for 12 years before selling it for a reported £10 million and moving into a modern house backing onto Sandbanks beach – but sold that because, according to the Daily Telegraph at the time, “they were fed up with people gawping into their property”. In 2023 it was reported he was “breathing a sigh of relief” after securing planning permission to build a luxury villa in place of another seaside home he had already demolished.

Last year a survey by Lloyds Bank, which tracked house price movements in 197 coastal locations, found Sandbanks to be Britain’s most expensive seaside location, with the average house price in the area £965,708. 

What a working-class hero – and just the man to pontificate on the plight of some of the most desperate people on Earth!