For Matt Goodwin — the failed Reform candidate whose new book is widely judged to contain several machine-generated hallucinations and other inaccuracies, though he denies it — there was widespread mockery and condemnation. But for critic Alex Preston, dumped by the New York Times for using an AI tool to help write a book review, objections were more muted. There were even attempts at sympathy and understanding — including from gleefully vituperative Goodwin-bashers. One might reasonably wonder how much the British commentariat really loathe AI writing, as opposed to how much they loathe Goodwin in particular.

In fact, both cases are equally unforgivable. Each goes much further than simply using AI as a research tool among others, cross-referring and checking sources as you go. To use an LLM to write text for you effectively turns your computer into a ventriloquist. And it turns you into the ventriloquist’s dummy.

This is not a good look. Up until five minutes ago, Goodwin was an academic. In the eyes of some, this makes him part of a despised elite, a fact which must be somewhat inconvenient to a would-be populist. But equally, it’s also a crucial part of his origin story, giving a valuable impression of epistemic authority to those that care. Otherwise he’d be just another bloke in a gilet muttering darkly about cousin marriage. At a minimum, academics are supposed to do their own research, double check their own inferences, and then write it all down in their own words. What else could society possibly want them for? Certainly not for the innate charisma or the bantz.

Suggested reading

Matt Goodwin: slopagandist

By Mary Harrington

In his blustering Spectator rebuttal, Goodwin insists that he did not use chatbots to write any part of the book. The invented quotes and other misunderstandings were all his, he says, a claim which is apparently supposed to reassure us. He even cites the negative opinion of AI detection software on the matter “just for fun”. But either way, he seems to have been using AI tools for his Substack for some time. Or perhaps he sometimes writes exactly like a robot because he has unconsciously ingested the deadening format (“this is not x, it’s y”, compressed rhetorical questions, and all the rest of it). Crafting beautiful sentences is not your average academic’s strongest suit, after all.

Literary critics have no such excuse. Preston — book reviewer as well as gentleman novelist, amateur cricketer, birdwatcher, and BBC arts show stalwart — is said to have confessed immediately to his mistake when asked about it by the Spectator literary editor. The apology came as if delivered by Hugh Grant — you could practically hear the stammerings and goshes. “Oh god it’s awful and I’m so ashamed. Such a total car crash.”

Preston’s explanation was that he had been pressed for time, and asked a bot to help “expand and smooth” a draft book review, as well as adjust for in-house style requirements. The AI-enhanced result included phrases written by someone else, which he did not spot. “I looked at how it had tidied up the end of the review but didn’t realize that it had also dropped in language from Christobel Kent’s Guardian review. I was rushed and stupid and I’m so sorry.”

Despite the apparent willingness of fellow literary luminaries to accept this with “there but for the grace of God … ” style mumbling, I’m not buying it. A loose reading of Preston’s explanation implies he didn’t notice the alien phrases at all. He used the tool without understanding its capacity for invention, looked only at the second half of the AI-adjusted text but not the first, then immediately sent the result off to the New York Times. But surely no writer is ever that stupid, or indeed that rushed.

A more likely scenario is that he read the tarted-up review in its entirety, knew full well there were sentences in it that were not his, but didn’t know they belonged to Christobel Kent in particular. Preston says that this was a “case of someone naively and clumsily using a tool they didn’t understand”; but he obviously grasped that the tool would “expand” his piece, because that’s exactly what he said he wanted it to do. What he didn’t understand, perhaps, was that the machine might plagiarize from a single source rather than synthesize hundreds of texts undetectably.

But appropriating the words of no one in particular is just as bad as plagiarism; and it is no defense to say it was only a few phrases. Like the proverbial curate’s egg, a covert robot co-production cannot be good in parts. You might as well take out all the machine-inserted words and phrases and write lorem ipsum there, or just blah blah blah instead. These passages mark the point at which the author’s mind retreated and went off for a nap.

When I taught in universities, I used to find it absurd that the official policy for plagiarism cases required us to estimate what mark the offending piece would have got, were it not plagiarized; and then to subtract some fixed percentage from that. Effectively, this seemed to force the marker onto the horns of a ludicrous dilemma. On one hand you might remove all plagiarized sections from consideration, but then you would be left with surreally disjointed statements and huge gaps, and there would be not much of an identifiable argument left to penalize further.

More from this author

The feminisation of autism

By Kathleen Stock

Alternatively you could treat the essay in its entirety as if it represented the original thoughts of the student, then subtract a bit; in which case your mark would seem to depend heavily on the quality of the author from whom sentences had been pilfered, and how extensively they were used. It seemed weirdly arbitrary to be giving more credit to students who thoroughly stripped down Ludwig Wittgenstein for parts, than to those who lightly borrowed from, say, Alain de Botton.

When you are assessing a student’s work, it is a basic presupposition that you are engaging with a single point of view, for which the stated author can rightly claim the credit. Any contradictions in the text reflect contradictions in the author’s own mind, as do any brilliant insights. Violate that contract and you might as well chuck the whole thing away. And the same goes all the more for professional writing, whether high or lowbrow. Relying on words that aren’t yours is not just lazy, it’s cowardly. If a writer lacks the courage to expose his mind to readers in all its naked imperfection, hiding behind the smooth extrusions of LLMS instead, then I don’t see why we should bother to read him.

And it is a poor defense to say that readers often cannot tell the difference. In the world of painting, skillful forgeries can look like astonishingly powerful originals until the ruse is revealed. Then suddenly there’s a gestalt switch, and the pictures look like what they always were: cheap fakes, free-riding on viewer credulity.

A different justification urges us to think of all human communication as a kind of ventriloquizing. Aren’t we always taking half-remembered words and phrases from other people and making them our own as we speak or write? Can’t we just see the use of an LLM as a simple extension of the creative process, with some externally-derived thoughts accepted, and others rejected — just as during a more internal process of reflection? This is part of the general project of redescribing human behavior to make it sound more like that of machines. That project is just as likely to undermine the impression of any meaning or value in human behavior than it is to reduce the distrust in robots. But in any case, we must not cede the point. Ordinary thinking and speaking as we know it is not “parroting” or “plagiarizing”. If it were, there would be no sense to these terms when applied critically, since the pejorative contrast with ordinary speech would be incomprehensible.

Even if it’s largely undetected by the intended readership, I can’t help feeling that AI will turn out to be a curse to many in the writing world, both established and aspiring. Clearly, as Goodwin and Preston show us, it is a temptation even to the already successful. A semantic glow-up is available at just the click of a mouse. Lots of bloggers I am aware of seem to use LLMs habitually. Preposterously, I’ve even seen the telltale signs in comments sections.

Wherever it is found, I imagine it’s quite stressful to gain a reputation for a writing style you have done little to deserve. The more admiration and followers you get for your punchy sentences, the less you will feel able to go back to your own deathless prose and reveal to the world what is really going on behind the curtain. In years to come, I expect we will see whole branches of therapy devoted to curing writers of LLM addiction. It seems that along with photographic filters and image generators, technology has discovered yet another way for people to hide their true selves from the gaze of others — and all this in a time where personal authenticity is supposedly uniquely prized. As the saying goes: you couldn’t make it up.

In the intervening years, with his bombastic style, and even his body language, Farage contributed to a fundamental reordering of British politics. The Clacton MP is sharp and his enthusiasm for a pint conveys an everyman bonhomie. More profoundly, though, he channels something lying deep within the national psyche: merriment. It’s no surprise, then, that his personality has so easily translated into a huge following on TikTok.

And as his star has risen exponentially, so too has his party’s — on current form, it looks likely to form the next government. All the same, what fueled Farage’s rise may not last forever. Reform’s political brand — like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it — used to be all conviviality and connection, but as the party has expanded, that merriment is increasingly being replaced by something else: whinging.

If anything, Matt Goodwin’s campaign to win the Gorton and Denton by-election was characterized by a complaining doomerism, failing to say much — if anything — that was positive about the seat, let alone the country. This constant focus on national decline undoubtedly bears fruit when building a popular Substack or YouTube channel. But if you’re trying to win over voters who can’t name the Home Secretary, you need something more hopeful. And even four days after his defeat, Goodwin was still at it. Nicknamed “Badloss” by some of his critics, he was relentless in his complaints that Britain’s electoral system was just as bad as Lebanon and Sierra Leone. Not that many people noticed, though. Let’s face it, if you lose by more than 4,000 votes, and proceed to say you were cheated of a deserved win, people are bound to switch off.

Indeed Goodwin’s failure, and Reform’s immediate response — imagine Donald Trump’s conspiratorial “Stop the Steal” campaign delivered with the hamminess of a Carry On film — is all the stranger given the Gorton result was objectively strong for both man and party. Pushing Labour into third anywhere in the north west is no mean feat. Goodwin simply lost to a strong candidate, Hannah Spencer, in a difficult race. So as the smoke cleared in a testing by-election, Reform sounded like losers.

More from this author

Will Britain follow the Carney Doctrine?

By Aaron Bastani

Spencer, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different as she shrugged off the negativity thrown her way by both Labour and Reform. A Bolton-born plumber, she focused throughout on bread-and-butter issues: stopping fly-tipping, cleaning up litter, fixing the housing crisis and sprucing up high streets. During the campaign she even completed a plastering qualification. As she stood to deliver her victory speech, focusing less on ideology than daily hardships, Goodwin will have known that these were subjects that would appeal to his target voters: the Greens were no longer the po-faced identitarian liberals who like to tut at your package holiday. At that moment, Reform must have realised that its pitch as the only credible alternative to the uniparty was lost.

But what happened to Reform’s mojo? Whether you blame the veteran Tory influx, Goodwin’s performance anxiety, the outsourcing of strategy to consultants — it is clear that the party has lost its “aura”. This seemed pretty clear when I was canvassing in Gorton, and was repeatedly and politely told by party canvassers that they weren’t permitted to speak to journalists. Nor was Goodwin particularly keen on individual interviews. Yet this is a mass party and, managed correctly, its membership should be its greatest asset. Suddenly, the party machine feels preachy, with a very New Labour feel. Warm ale is out; a pint of control freakery, please.

This relinquishing of authenticity by Reform has started to be reflected in polling. At the weekend, as the Greens announced they had passed 200,000 members in England and Wales for the first time, FindOutNow placed them in second place; on Monday, Lord Ashcroft’s survey put them at third, just three points behind Reform, with almost 90 seats.

Then, on Tuesday morning, came the big one. YouGov — Britain’s most reputable pollster — put them on 21% of the vote and in second place, just behind Reform: five points ahead of both Labour and the Tories. In all likelihood, Reform and the Greens will have more members than Labour come the local elections in May. And, for those looking to dismiss the Greens as a party of students, bohemians and unemployed artists, think again. YouGov gives them a 6% lead over Reform among all Brits under 65.

Given the avalanche of attacks and negative campaigning against the Greens in recent weeks, from both the Right and the center, how is any of this possible? After all, similar attacks paralysed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour after 2017, and led to a drubbing two years later. Yet Polanski seems to go from strength to strength, leading to panic among some on the Right, with much of Westminster struggling to understand exactly why the Greens are soaring so high.

Traditionally, many of the party’s would-be supporters figured a vote for the party would be a vote for environmentally friendly policies. When Caroline Lucas was the party’s sole representative at Westminster, the Greens were able to push climate-related issues into the political realm in a remarkable way, from fracking to net zero. It only took one MP.

As the party has increased its MPs to four, the modern Greens have made the political weather on everything from renationalization to Gaza. Today, its MPs function as committed campaigners on strongly held policies at a national level — as well as effective constituency representatives at a local one. This understandably appeals to many of those voters disappointed by the traditional parties.

It helps, too, that Green supporters care about such a range of issues — from electoral reform to rewilding beavers to rent caps to closer ties with Europe. Some simply want to exert pressure on the Labour Party to move further Left. This broad, semi-coherent theory of change sees the party as an expression of social movements as much as an electoral vehicle.

More from this author

Farage is preparing for power

By Aaron Bastani

One downside is that the party risks becoming too successful. The uncomfortable truth is that too many first-place finishes mean the Greens will need to offer more than a grab-bag of progressive causes. For now, though, such problems remain in the future. My suspicion is that few Green voters expect Polanski to be the next prime minister. Many may not even want such an outcome, preferring the party to be a junior coalition member in a progressive government. Indeed, when I interviewed Polanski last week, soon after the Gorton and Denton result, he merely expressed an ambition to lead a party of several dozen difficult MPs in Parliament.

This, incidentally, is also why anti-Green scare tactics, from both Labour and the Right, will ultimately fail. It’s easy to make radicalism feel like an existential threat when it risks actually leading a government — as with Corbyn. That isn’t the case with Polanski. Certainly, comparing a by-election win in Manchester with Iran’s Islamic Revolution strikes most Britons as unhinged. In any case, it’s hard to present an organisation as much of a danger when all its MPs can fit in the back of a London cab.

Ironically, this anti-establishment vibe is also what is most winning about Polanski’s Greens. The party and its leader manage to couple radical purpose with fun — which, in a strange way, is reminiscent of Farage at his best. While I had to grab a few hours of sleep after Thursday’s result, Polanski stayed up all night. The following evening, he appeared on The Last Leg, full of verve and enthusiasm. This relentless energy is invaluable in politics.

Tramping around the sodden streets of Levenshulme a few weeks ago, with all those houses proudly displaying Green party placards in their front gardens, it was strikingly obvious that Reform’s success had opened the door to new possibilities for the Left. After all, if we are suddenly predicting that Nigel Farage can go from YouTube to No. 10, something previously viewed as impossible, then what’s so outlandish about the Greens overtaking Labour?

In terms of what is politically possible, Nigel Farage has — again — done more than blow the bloody doors off. Only this time it won’t all be to his own advantage.

Once a safe seat — Labour won 50.8% of the vote 18 months ago — today, such things have evaporated. This by-election was called after its MP, Andrew Gwynne, resigned on the grounds of ill health (he is 51). He was previously suspended from Labour for writing in a local MPs WhatsApp group: “Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you.” As a paradigm of our fracturing democracy, it can’t be bettered.

Polling currently has Labour coming third, and Reform or the Greens winning, because blood will have blood. Last year, Reform took nearby Runcorn and Helsby from Labour by just six votes: and they didn’t have the help of the Greens, who this week are standing Hannah Spencer, a plumber with dancer’s legs, golden trouser suits and soaring, raging cadences. She begins most speeches with references to herself, because this is the era of politics as personal journey. Reform has Matt Goodwin, an academic-turned-broadcaster who vibrates like a tuning fork, trying to project the kind of wracked reasonableness that used to be native to Tory wets. He is helped by the presence of Advance UK, a Christian Nationalist party to the right of Reform, because they make Reform look like humanists.

But this feels less like a by-election than the frenzied, and thoughtless, herald of a coming war: extremists meeting themselves. To mirror it, this is a constituency in two halves. The west — poorer, nearer Manchester, and with a large Muslim population — is a forest of Green Party signs: 30% of this constituency is Muslim. The Muslim Vote campaign (“Peace in Palestine, Equality in the UK”) has endorsed the Greens: social conservatives will vote with trans advocates to punish Labour for Gaza. To the east, white working-class Denton is all Reform-leaning voters and Union Jacks. And here, in the Red Lion pub, unofficial Reform HQ, they sing karaoke with alcohol-fueled nostalgia. They seem to think in ballads, as if these songs were their politics. A large man rises, and sings:

Home is a love that I miss very much
The past has been bottled and labeled with love

But no one is listening.

An aged veteran talks about betrayal as he slowly gets drunk. He won’t let me record him or even take notes. “You know how I feel,” he says, in mitigation; and it’s true that a lot of people here talk as if they have read the same Facebook posts. The talking points — immigration; stupid Net Zero; the death of British culture — are identical. He shows me a photograph taken after a military parade. It is of him, and three friends. One went home from the parade, he says, and hanged himself. His drinking partner, a woman in her sixties, tells me: “We [the white working class] don’t matter.” She says this very deliberately, hitting the table with the side of her hand. She repeats it — “We. Don’t. Matter.” — and every time she says it, she hits the table. Then, in a blink, she is crying. “You don’t know my story. I’ve taken it from men. I’ve brought up three kids. I’ve worked every day. I’m not represented.”

The hustings in St Andrew’s Church, in Levenshulme, are sullen and angry. Ten candidates are here, including a representative from the Communist League, which feels oddly appropriate — if we are re-enacting the Weimar Republic, let’s do it right — and an Asda cashier standing as a Libertarian who behaves like he has won a prize. Only Sir Oink-A-Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party is missing, as if it is too trivial for him. But it is hard to mock politics when it feels so joyless.

The candidates sit by a sign that says, “Fishers of Men”. The audience leans Green, but there are three Terfs in the front row supporting the Conservative candidate Charlotte Cadden, a former police detective who is skilled and sensible and looks exhausted.

They give opening statements which, consciously or not, evoke home. Green (Hannah Spencer): “I’ve probably fitted a toilet for some of you.” Labour (Angeliki Stogia, interpreting JFK): “I came here from Greece over 13 years ago, and I found a city that did not ask where I came from.” Liberal Democrat (Jackie Pearcey): “This is a great place to live. I’ve lived here long enough I’ve even managed to pay off the mortgage.” The response to Labour is tepid. Between, the “Dear resident, Fuck your bins”, message, the cost of living, and Gaza, her support has shriveled to a nub.

This constituency has common problems but despite this, and possibly because of it, they decide to talk about Jews for 40 minutes. This by-election deals in fairy politics: the theoretical, the fantastical, and the mad. Jew hatred is only one of many harbingers of collapse to choose from: and Gaza is a continent away. The first question: what is the candidate’s response to the rise of antisemitism since October 7, 2023?  Cadden, the Tory, replies: “I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community.” Goodwin finds it “utterly depressing”. Spencer blames “divisive politics and politicians who spread hatred and vile stories about individual groups”.

None of them has anything valuable — that is, analytical — to say about antisemitism, other than they don’t like it: they speak to air. But when a man asks: “Do you agree with the majority of genocide scholars that there’s a genocide in Gaza?” that air turns febrile. Jackie Pearcey says it comes, “pretty close”. Spencer says, “We do not need to wait a decade, or however long it takes for a tribunal to tell us that what is happening in front of our eyes is a genocide.” Angeliki Stogia, trying to hold the seat for the governing party, says in her tiny, gentle voice “it is heart-breaking”, and cries.

The SDP candidate Sebastian Moore, a ruddy boy, says, slowly and with genuine curiosity, “I don’t know if our politics has always been like this. Maybe people that are slightly older than me can tell me. What’s happening in the Middle East, whether I term it a genocide or not, has no bearing on the tragedy that is unfolding there. So, no, I’m not going to answer your question.”

There are heckles, particularly towards Goodwin, and, among some candidates, an overarching contempt for each other. Goodwin accuses Spencer of misrepresenting his tax policy; Spencer accuses Goodwin of misrepresenting her drug policy.

Real politics is soporific here – you can sense the room flagging. But the trans question, or rather statement — the Government is transphobic — ignites it again. Spencer says, inevitably, “I think I was here when the Levenshulme Pride took place!” The Liberal Democrat says she believes that, “trans people are people”, though no one is suggesting they aren’t. She is addressing a void. As we stare into it, Goodwin says he must leave: “I’m meeting pub landlords after this, whose businesses are being completely decimated by the current government.” He is laughed at, though I cannot see the joke.

The next day, outside the Green Party HQ, I meet a Muslim who has driven from Birmingham to campaign for the Greens. He says he joined the Party two weeks ago: “it is [the] first time that I’ve actually joined a [political] party.” He has been in the UK for 64 years. But only recently, he says, has he been asked “‘Am I English?’ ‘Am I British?’ ‘Do I belong?’. You know what they’re saying, but they’re not saying it. You not only fear the color part, but you also fear the part that you’re a Muslim and therefore an Islamist or therefore,” he speaks very slowly, and tiredly, “a terrorist. I have six grandchildren. For my grandkids, the times are desperate. Or will be.”

As I leave, I see a handmade sign: it reads, “Ministry of Plumbing and Plastering. Hannah Spencer, MP.” She is, I see, a bewitching candidate. And as I walk around this constituency and talk to the voters fleeing Labour, this election feels like it is playing in the realm of fantasy. It is not really about racism, though it is everywhere. It is about home, and where it is, and who has one, and who doesn’t. Real politics — the management of competing needs — is hard. Labour asked for a decade to fix the state, but patience has already gone. Instead, voters fall to magical thinking: that voting Green will help Palestinians; that voting Reform will recover the Empire; that you will, one day, find home.

The next day, Advance UK pitch their stall opposite the Red Lion in Denton, in an empty square. A woman tells me, “I’ve got brown skin, but I’m British through and through.” Her parents were immigrants from Jamaica. “I’ve got red, white and blue flowing through my blood.” Illegal immigrants, she says, have homes. They are staying in five-star hotels and swimming in pools, “whereas our guys [are] on the streets. People are getting angry. They don’t want to pay for people in hotels. They don’t want to pay for their tennis lessons and their trampolining lessons.”

Her fantasy is that Reform is, “controlled opposition. They’re paid to do what they do by whoever.” By whom? “I’m not saying. We need change,” she goes on happily, “but Nigel [Farage] is not the one to bring it. His right-hand man is Zia Yusuf. This is a Christian country. We shouldn’t be led at all by a different religion.” I ask her if she thinks there shouldn’t be Muslim, or even Jewish, MPs. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have any different religions, but not in high government positions.” I think of the woman at the bus stop, saying things can’t get worse, and watch Goodwin roll down the street on his Reform bus, which is as clean and empty as a new house. He waves a sign and promises, through his loudhailer, to rid us of Keir Starmer. His promise, if elected, is this: “This seat will never be ignored again. It will never be neglected, and it will never be disrespected.” Dreamland, again.

In the Queen Vic pub opposite, an angry young man points at his teeth. They are also a metaphor. “I need five fillings,” he tells me. “I’m fucked.” It will cost £3,995 privately, he says, and he cannot find an NHS dentist. He has a good job — he is an engineer — but suggests that perhaps, instead, he should become an illegal immigrant? “Do I need to go to France and throw my ID in the fucking bin?” he asks me. “Money shouldn’t be free,” he goes on, “I work seven days a week. Labour wants to tax the air that you breathe. Are you mad?”

Reform is “guaranteed” to win here, he says, from behind his reluctantly political teeth, but in truth it could go three ways. The Greens could edge past Reform, but the Muslim-LGBTQX coalition cannot hold long-term. Labour could still run through the middle, though in such reduced numbers victory will be considered defeat. By-elections are runes: they show us how angry people are, and these are the angriest I have met since Covid, and significantly more hopeless. “The Greens are fucking mad,” he says. “They will do heroin but not eat meat. If you’re a straight white man you’re a cunt. The white person is demonized more than anyone.”

Here ends centrist politics, at least for now, because hope in incremental solutions has gone. If you believe these runes, Reform will be the next government. And if Reform should win the next General Election?

“I’m not convinced governance will be so much of an issue,” Goodwin tells me. “Public opinion will be a challenge. We are living through managed decline, right? And so, the public appetite for change is enormous, but public patience is extremely limited”. He has told Farage that he thinks they may win the election “because we’re just the other guys, right? We’re not Labour, we’re not Tory, we’re just the other guys.” And so, he thinks, “there may not be a honeymoon period at all. There may not be a significant period of support in the polls. It may just sort of prove to be very febrile and very volatile. I’m convinced it will be much more like Trump 2 than Trump 1, and we’ve got so much that’s planned. The untold story about Reform is how much legislation is already drafted and prepared.”

Here, though, the voters do not know that; I am not even sure they care. In the Queen Vic pub, when I ask what will change under a Reform government, an older, red-bearded man, speaks for the first time. “Nothing,” he says. But he will vote for them all the same.

The task of political scientists during the 2010s was to spin a mythology in which the elites could cocoon themselves. “The extent of Russian-backed fraud means the referendum is invalid,” said one social scientist; Brexit was a “tsunami of bile” vomited up by the Murdoch press “that has downed and drowned a once great nation”, said another. All this was par for the course in Goodwin’s old milieu. In his most recent book, Bad Education, he reveals that one of his colleagues at the University of Kent gave lectures in a “Bollocks to Brexit” T-Shirt. You can hardly blame him for wanting to leave that sordid world behind.

He has left it for the no less sordid world of politics. When Goodwin, as a young scholar in the late 2000s, first embarked on his academic research into the radical Right in Britain, it was in the manner of Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees; now he is swinging from tree to tree as Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election. He has been plotting his entry into electoral politics for some time. He had promised that, once he had got to 100,000 subscribers on Substack, he would launch a party of his own. It’s probably for the best that Reform snapped him up before he reached that milestone: what with “Advance”, “Reclaim” “Restore”, and “the Conservative and Unionist Party”, the last thing the British Right needs is another vanity project splitting the vote.

More from this author

Test article

By Samuel Rubinstein

Academics tend not to fare well in the political domain. A dozen years ago, when still deep in the weeds of the Right as associate professor of politics at the University of Nottingham, Goodwin co-wrote Revolt on the Right with Rob Ford. The book’s early drama involves the trials and tribulations of Alan Sked, the LSE historian who set up UKIP in the Nineties. Sked was no good at politics: he was “only interested in obscure constitutional issues, and had little grasp of how to run a campaign”. Having written several books about political campaigns, Goodwin is today at some advantage — though it will still be a tall order for Reform to win in a constituency which is over a quarter Muslim. It is presumably for this reason that he has so far toned down the strident anti-immigration views for which he has become notorious, such as his claim that people from ethnic minorities born and raised in the country were not always British.

Sometimes Goodwin’s unusual 15-year journey, from liberal political scientist to Right-wing pundit and thence to Reform politician, is presented as a Damascene conversion — or, by the more cynical among his critics, the product of audience capture, ego, or grift. His earlier academic work does, however, contain some seeds of the Substack and the GB News show that have since come to flower. Goodwin himself describes his early endeavors as having argued that “the people voting for things like Brexit had legitimate grievances over issues such as mass immigration”. His 2018 book, National Populism — co-written with his former doctoral supervisor, Roger Eatwell — did not shy away from addressing those “legitimate grievances”, and neither did his public interventions around that time, including for UnHerd. That he had some sympathy with the grievances of his subjects was sensed, in fact, rather earlier, by the BNP’s Eddy Butler, who wrote in 2011 that the young scholar might have “an element of empathy with [our] aims if not the means”. “Perhaps,” he conjectured, “the hours of interviews he has undertaken has had a Stockholm syndrome effect.”

Largely on the basis of conversations with Butler and his ilk, Goodwin has for a very long time been banging the drum — or sounding the alarm — that there exists in Britain far broader support for the radical Right than the elites and political scientists would wish to think. Already in his first major book, New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party (2011), one can sense his frustration at the complacency of other political analysts, who believed that “extreme Right parties like the BNP will never attract and sustain mass support”. There existed, for parties on the radical Right ranging from the extreme BNP to the more mainstream UKIP, a natural constituency of “angry white men”. Goodwin has been consistent, throughout his career, that this constituency could not be easily ignored.

Notwithstanding this degree of consistency, the younger Goodwin certainly cut a different figure in the public sphere from the one he cuts now. He was happy, for a time, to add his voice to the elite chorus. In 2013, during the Cameron era, he argued in the New Statesman that UKIP’s popularity had little to do with immigration concerns after all, and that everyone in the country would be happier if we had simply stopped talking about the subject altogether. He would surely include his past self in the “elite failure” which was in his view responsible for the riots of summer 2024.

Likewise, where now he paints a gloomy picture of demographics and integration, his earlier work tended to sound the hopeful note that social cohesion and tolerance would triumph. The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (2010) — another collaboration with Eatwell, and one markedly different from National Populism — ends with a point about “the football” that prefigures the preoccupations of the Southgate Era: “Squadloads of young fans play soccer games on their Xboxes and PlayStations which feature the slogan ‘Let’s Kick Racism Out of Soccer’, and they are the future.” The presence of black players in the England team seemed a sure sign that liberal multiculturalism would win the day, and that the natural constituency of the populist Right would die out eventually. The “angry white men”, the “losers of modernization”, would stay forever in their place: a “quiet revolution” in attitudes about immigration and diversity would leave them as yesterday’s men.

Goodwin’s stated positions were elite ones then, and in a certain sense they remained so. You would hardly know it from all the criticism lobbed at him from the sequestered and low-powered faculties of sociology and political science at Britain’s middling universities, but his interpretation of Brexit, set out immediately after the referendum, has more or less dominated discussion and steered policy for the past 10 years. His analysis tended, at least initially, to devote more attention to the economic and cultural depression of Britain’s “Left Behind” than to any specific concerns over immigration — and this, in essence, was the logic that allowed Boris Johnson to combine his “Levelling Up” agenda with unprecedented levels of immigration. Indeed, there is a moment in Values, Voice and Virtue, his 2023 polemic against the “new elite” that drove the country into the ground, when Goodwin sheepishly admits that the true meaning of Brexit — that it was, in essence, a scream of the “Left Behind” — had been grasped by Theresa May and Nick Timothy in the damp squib campaign of 2017.

Suggested Reading

Inside the mind of Laila Cunningham

By Felix Pope

Goodwin’s books are markedly Blue Labour in places, with all the anti-Thatcherism and anti-liberalism that this implies. Values, Voice and Virtue contains some praise for Peter Shore, even Tony Benn, and trots out the well-worn Lord Glasman narrative about how the socially-liberal Blairites — the lanyard classes — betrayed Labour’s working-class base. Goodwin, like Glasman, describes himself as economically Left and culturally Right. He will want Reform to pursue this political sweet spot, and to realize what he has long prophesied as the “great realignment” — the potent combination of social conservatism with economic interventionism. That alignment was supposed to occur with Brexit, and then it was supposed to occur with Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019. These, in Goodwin’s view, were two false starts, two wasted opportunities — the latter, with the “Boriswave”, amounting even to betrayal.

Will Reform, with Goodwin’s assistance, at last bring the great realignment to fruition? It seems quite likely that he will once again be disappointed. Nigel Farage is on the economic Right, and Zia Yusuf even more so. As are all the recent arrivals from the Conservative Party, with the exception of Danny Kruger. The presence of such people and ideas in the Reform coalition — low tax, small state — is something that Goodwin’s model of politics, with the “great realignment” as its logical terminus, has always struggled to accommodate. One of those interviewed in Revolt on the Right is John, a 64-year-old factory-worker from Nottingham; he voted for the Tories under “Maggie”, shifted to Labour after she resigned, came close to voting BNP in 2005, and backed UKIP in the EU elections in 2009. Goodwin (and Ford) used this example to substantiate what is in effect a “postliberal” theory of modern British politics, to tell a certain story about the “Left Behind” and the “losers of modernization”. Does it not matter, here, that John is a Thatcherite?

Clearly Goodwin believes that Reform’s current popularity is the product of material grievances on the ground; clearly, too, he thinks those grievances have much more to do with immigration than he used to. But he also knows, to quote from an article he wrote when he was 26-years old, that parties have the power to “influence their own destiny”, and that their fortunes depend as much on “organization, personnel, and propaganda” as to the conditions that push and pull ordinary voters in various directions. For someone with considerable ambition, or an appetite for power, this would quite naturally provide a strong incentive to quit merely observing political trends and to enter the fray in order to shape them. “Many people”, he says at the end of Values, Voice and Virtue, are “searching for a radical alternative… the only question that remains is what form this radical alternative will take and when it will arrive”. This, really, is how all his books have concluded, even the ones he wrote back when he was cooped up in the Ivory Tower. He used to have to go into the field to see what form it would take. Now, he can fancy himself in the mirror instead.