On a cold February night in Levenshulme, a black Volkswagen People Carrier is parked outside a small parish church, around which a small crowd begins to gather. From behind the car’s darkened windows steps the Reform candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election, sporting a trademark gilet that makes him look less like a politician and more like someone straight from a grouse shoot. As he entered the church where the election hustings were held, a pamphlet was thrust into his hand, which, as he later discovered with horror, was a flyer for the local branch of the Communist League, with policies such as “Amnesty for all immigrants” and “Saving Cuba’s Socialist Revolution.”
However, when you’re trying to catch the eye of someone as elusive as Professor Matt Goodwin, you have to take your chances whenever they come. In recent weeks the former academic and rightwing firebrand has been a curiously invisible presence in the constituency he seeks to represent: eternally recognizable but remotely unapproachable, always visible without ever really being seen.
None of the dozens of voters I spoke to across the area over a two-week period in February had seen him, let alone on their street or doorstep. “He’d probably be cold in St Albans,” joked a young man crossing Stockport Road in Denton, referring to Goodwin’s southern upbringing and unmistakable home counties drawls.
This is not entirely true. By his own account, Goodwin has been campaigning daily since announcing his candidacy in late January, but it’s an ambivalent term. For the most part, this is a campaign organized for the benefit of the Internet: consisting of a few carefully orchestrated media appearances, arranged meetings and brief photo opportunities. A black car pulls up beside a row of pubs or terrace houses; Its cargo emerges; Photographs were taken; Content captured. By the time it’s posted, the candidate will have long been transported, perhaps back to the safety of Reform’s headquarters, a corrugated iron shack on an industrial estate just off the M67.
Again, given the toxic fallout on both sides of the political divide that Goodwin’s campaign created, perhaps a certain caution is to be expected. Even by the melodramatic standards of classic British by-elections, it was an unusually feverish month, filled with controversy and anger. There are accusations on all sides of phantom polls and faking numbers, dirty tricks and misinformation. Goodwin’s team member Adam Mitula was suspended for racist social media posts in which he claimed he would “not touch a Jewish woman” and disputed the true death toll of the Holocaust. There were allegations on social media – thoroughly debunked by FullFact – that Reform had doctored the photos to add posters to the windows of the house. Far-right activist Tommy Robinson gave Goodwin his personal endorsement.
And who can blame the lighthearted and ever-vigilant operation of reform from wanting to put as much distance as humanly possible between their candidate and any potentially embarrassing questions? Requests to interview him or to accompany him on canvassing were politely declined. A stern security guard ushers us away from campaign HQ, reminding us that “all the way to the end of the car park is private space.” Earlier this month Goodwin withdrew from the hustings in Gorton on the grounds that it did not provide a fair atmosphere. Other candidates said it was because the venue could not provide him with a private green room.
For a proud free-speech warrior who always readily embraces the adversarial side of politics, who says what he says and is singularly offended by who he offends in the process, it all seems absurd. Goodwin has a huge substock following, significant media print and enough money to not need an MP salary. Why is a man with his own GB News show and a huge public platform concerned about bin collections and bus facilities in a place he has not visited before January? What exactly are the voters of Gorton and Denton preparing to unleash on this nation? In short: What’s the long game here?
Gorton and Denton are really seven places in one: a jagged dinosaur tooth of a constituency, absurdly reconstructed in 2023, stretching from the slow-growing suburbs of south Manchester to the post-industrial villages and small towns of Tameside in the east. Some of it is charming and some is terrifying. No single message, no single campaign can be expected to please everyone. In a way it is a perfect microcosm of modern Britain, fractured and displaced from it, separated by motorways and algorithms.
I sit in pubs and cafes and libraries and supermarkets and have countless conversations. There was no great enthusiasm for reform in these parts, and even less for Goodwin. Nigel Farage has been variously described as a “chance”, “soft-spoken”, “snake-oil salesman” and “full of shit”. But people want to vote for his candidate because – and this is a recurring theme – they are “given”. Everyone else has been fucked-up and now it’s their turn.
Basic, unconscious racism sounds ridiculous until you hear it come out of a real person’s mouth. We work hard; They come here for benefits. My son cannot buy a house; They get free houses. Also, if you’re hungry, there’s a Chinese restaurant down the road. (It was a real conversation, and the guy was really nice. He bought me two pints of Cruzcampo, showed me his holiday photos, and asked if I was any good at paper folding.)
To the extent anyone heard of Goodwin, it was because of his GB News show, which was often played with the sound down in pubs. No one remembers what he actually said about imposing fines for wearing a burqa in public or taxing childless women. This is clearly enough, a problem for anyone trying to campaign against him. How do you resist a story that people can’t remember? How can you deny the vibe?
“When I hear something racist or xenophobic, I challenge it,” Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer said. “But there’s a huge group of people who consider reform, who are not racist, often don’t fully understand what reform is. They don’t know what Matt Goodwin is saying. When I tell people what he says about Muslims, what he says about women, people are really shocked. So maybe what we know about him, people don’t know about him yet.”
Asked previously about his past comments on Islam, Goodwin said: “What you find in places like Longsight and Burnage are Muslim voters who are often socially and culturally conservative and agree with us on issues like open borders, legalizing drugs, men going into women’s spaces, antisocial behavior.”
One of the Greens’ main lines of attack on the doorstep is that Goodwin is not really from Manchester. How is this square, enriched by the idea that it is a city for everyone, that outsiders have made it their home over the centuries? “You don’t have to be from here to be one of us,” Spencer replied. “I believe that wholeheartedly. However, I don’t believe he’s interested in furthering the area. I think he’s doing it because it’s a step on his career ladder. He wants status and attention and pride.”
Goodwin is bristling. “I’m sorry, why do I want you to leave the country?” he asked, unhappy with the direction the conversation had taken. “When did anyone ever say something like that?”
We arrived back at Levenshulme a few minutes before the opening of the hustings, and there was precious little time for small talk. Goodwin has previously said that Englishness is a “deeply rooted ethnicity in people who can trace their roots back generations.” He said that even if people from minority ethnic backgrounds were born here, they were not necessarily British. Farage has already unveiled plans to deport 600,000 migrants in the first term of a reform government. “Remigration” — a fancy word for the “send them back” motif that has defined far-right rhetoric for decades — is back on the political agenda. is in Did they mean me? who are they Where back?
“I’m not sure you’ve looked at the reform process in detail,” Goodwin said. “What I said in relation to 7/7 and the Manchester bombings is that if you decide to come to Britain and blow up our children, you are denying membership of our community. Now, based on knowing you for a minute, you look like someone who doesn’t want to blow up your fellow citizens.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I respond.
“It looks like you’re working hard, probably paying taxes and probably following the rules. So I have nothing but support for people who do that. If you’re here illegally, you’ll be deported.”
The problem is that “legal” and “illegal” are very loose terms, defined above all by the government and politics of the day. What if my parents came here legally in the 1970s, but what if a future regime fixated on the evils of multiculturalism, determined to roll back mass immigration, decided it wasn’t actually legal? “I don’t understand,” I said, “do you turn it back and turn it back. At what point do you say: OK, we’ve got our culture back? At what point is that enough?”
“Personally, I think we should do what America did after the 1920s and after Ellis Island,” he replied. “America has paused all immigration for 40 years. I think we should pause immigration except for a very small amount needed for some public services. And then bring back very limited immigration, comparable to what we had in the 1980s and 1990s before Tony Blair.”
But of course we had social unrest and racial tensions in the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s, 1980s. Does he really think it was a better, more harmonious country in the 1980s?
“There are some glitches,” Goodwin said disdainfully. “But nothing compared to what we’ve had for the last 25 years. 7/7, Manchester Arena, British Jews being murdered in the streets of Manchester. I mean, how much do you want to put up with this? It’s a problem for the left, an endless disaster. I appreciate the communities and the very fair writing of this interview, otherwise the press officer of the Reformation would be close.
I finally realized why Goodwin had entered the rat race, no doubt excited that he had yet another lib. Over the course of the next two hours at the hustings, his eyes would often glaze over and drop like parishioners raising their concerns about air quality, fly-tipping, traffic gridlock. What really animated him was reimagining culture wars, the end of civilization, politics as a vehicle for race debate, parliamentary by-elections in YouTube comment threads.
In essence this is the crux of right-wing strategy: Politicians are interested enough in what voters care about so that they can get what they care about. Gorton and Denton go to the polls on Thursday. What does Matt Goodwin really think? By the time we find out, it may be too late.
