It is to be hoped the English Defence League left Bradford on Saturday with a warm sense of well-being and purpose. Because it seems that was the entire point of their demonstration in the city – a somewhat desperate attempt to bolster their own self-confidence in the wake of their leadership crisis.

Tommy Robinson, the man who founded the EDL four years ago, has apparently turned over a new leaf and stepped down from the anti-Islamic group, leaving them somewhat rudderless just ahead of their much-advertised visit to the city.

And like a somewhat mystified, cuckolded and abandoned middle aged man, left sitting in his living room wondering where it all went wrong, the EDL spent its visit to Bradford trying to put a brave face on things and essentially telling itself that it wasn’t really bothered.

After the EDL rally in 2010, in which the demonstration was confined to the Urban Gardens, the Council and the police had taken a harder line with the EDL this time, closing off the section of Bridge Street outside the Interchange and effectively kettling them outside St George’s Hall, with The Queen pub remaining open to service them with beer and toilet facilities. Because, let’s face it, rhetoric such as was spouted on Saturday afternoon needs a lot of lubrication.

They came in dribs and drabs from mid-morning, draped in St George cross flags and wearing their tribal colours – one group of young men wore matching hoodies proclaiming them The Northern Crew and emblazoned with the legend: “Who’s Streets?... Our streets!!!” Well, no-one ever said that a good command of the English language was strictly necessary to be a right-wing extremist.

By the time the coaches turned up, shuttling them in from across the Pennines and points north and south, disgorging supporters waving banners from as far as Portsmouth, there must have been fewer than 600 gathered outside the pub.

In other words, the sort of away-day jolly a non-league football club might reasonably expect. Yes, the big, long-heralded EDL rally in Bradford was that extensive. The police officers drafted in from Greater Manchester, Northamptonshire, all over the country, easily outnumbered the EDL, perhaps as many as three or four to one.

Which, when you add the policing bill to the cost of the road closures, the travel disruption and the unused metal fencing erected across the plaza between the Crown Court and the Victoria Hotel, is a lot of effort and expenditure – from the public purse, remember – for what amounted to not very much at all.

After a few blasts of recorded greatest hits from an EDL rock album – most of the choruses tended to be “E-E-EDL” – a succession of speakers took to a small gazebo bought from a garden centre, most of them sporting some kind of head-gear to distinguish them from the rest. A man in a military-style beret told the crowd that the EDL had been coming to Bradford for four years and “nothing is changing”. So, he declared, “we’re going to keep on coming.”

He was followed by a man in a deer-stalker, who set out the ground-rules for what he called “the new EDL”. “It’s a lovely turnout,” he said, as an aside, as though addressing a garden party. Then he reminded everyone of the date – “12th of the 10th 2013” – and told them this was the birth of the new, post-Robinson EDL.

Mr Deerstalker said all the right things to get the crowd going. “We are patriots. We love our country. We will not be moved. We will never, ever surrender”. He declared: “We are at war!” and that got them going, to the point where he had to calm them down a bit and appeal for people not to do the Nazi salute. That’s not what we want people to see, he said.

Because, said Mr Deerstalker, the EDL does not stand with racists or Nazis. The EDL, it seems is about inclusivity these days. He pointed at a rainbow flag being flown and shouted: “We support the gays!”. He said: “We’ve got one person here in a wheelchair!” He said the EDL supports our troops, and wants them home. He organised a round of applause for the police.

This, then is the “new EDL”. Mr Deerstalker said, “Let’s show this country that just because the leader has gone the EDL lives on! Every member has a voice rather than one man dictating what goes on!”

Tommy Robinson may have apparently washed his hands of the EDL, but his presence loomed over this damp squib of a grey-day protest like a ghost. For all their contention that they are not racist, not Nazis, not anti-this, not anti-that, they seemed in Bradford merely to be a rather sad-looking gathering of people trying to shoe-horn modern issues such as sexual grooming of children, female genital mutilation and terrorism into an ill-thought out and hateful catch-all anti-Islam policy that holds neither water nor much credibility.

Like Frankenstein, Tommy Robinson might well have created and abandoned a monster. And like that monster, on the basis of Saturday’s non-event, the EDL without Robinson might make a lot of noise and fuss for a bit, but could ultimately just drift off into the darkness, never to be heard of again.