Over the past few weeks, The Mill has been trying to bring you insights from the main campaign teams in the Gorton and Denton by-election.
Of the three competitive candidates, by far the best known is Reform’s Matt Goodwin. He is a former academic, once well-known for his research into Britain's far-right, who later became a prominent right-wing commentator, writer and GB News host. His detractors say he effectively went native, and gradually came round to the far-right positions he was researching. He denies this claim, arguing that his research gives him a unique insight into how Britain’s white working class have been let down by a perceived liberal establishment.
Ideally, we’d like to spend some time with Goodwin and ask our own questions. Both the Green and Labour parties have offered us access to their candidates and we’ve already been able to join them on the campaign trail. Reform UK has yet to respond to our request to meet Goodwin, and he wasn’t present at the first hustings of the campaign on Tuesday, attended by The Mill, claiming after the event on social media that he had avoided it as he felt it would be a biased environment. So, without access to the man himself, we felt it was best to start looking at his team.
Earlier this week, the anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate passed us their research into Goodwin’s fellow campaigners. They had identified five separate individuals who had been out campaigning with Goodwin who had shared racist content online or expressed support for far-right groups. In some cases, there is little grey area: Goodwin’s campaigners have expressed clear support for the far-right group Britain First, baselessly suggested that 60-70% of transgender people are paedophiles or posted online that Muslims are only in the UK because they wish to “conquer” it.
This is interesting for a few reasons, one of which is the fact that Nigel Farage has always been at pains to distance his party from known far-right groups. He’s been publicly critical of Tommy Robinson on many occasions, and as UKIP leader he banned ex-British National Party members from running for his party.
And yet Goodwin, who is striving to become Farage’s ninth MP, and whose victory would probably represent the biggest and most significant one so far for Reform, appears to have surrounded himself with exactly the kinds of characters Farage claims he keeps at a distance.
Chief among these is Adam Mitula, who is currently serving as Reform UK’s interim campaign manager in Tameside. On his Facebook page Mitula has posted photos of himself with what appears to be a small team assisting Goodwin in his bid to become MP, also including Tameside councillor Allan Hopwood (who you might remember from this Mill interview) and Rob Barrowcliffe, Tameside’s interim Reform branch chair.
Mitula is an entrepreneur who has been involved in various businesses, including in real estate, crypto and Fintech. He was born in Szczecin, Poland, and on his website he says he was raised in a traditional Catholic culture and drew inspiration from Arnold Schwarzenegger in his weightlifting pursuits.
Mitula’s output, posted on social media, includes his suggestion that “60-70%” of transgender people are paedophiles, the fact he would “never touch a Jewish woman”, and his use of the n-word. Meanwhile, discussing the number of people who died in the Holocaust in July 2024, he appears to try and play down the statistics, writing: “6 million polish [sic] people including some Jews. They always use Poles to make up the number. And on top of it they claim Poles were killing. Just sick.”
There’s no saying that Matt Goodwin was aware of any of this, he may find it abhorrent, but if he does then it’s odd that he decided against replying to any of our questions on the matter.
Then there’s Kelly Cooling. Cooling has been photographed on the campaign trail in recent days with Matt Goodwin, but as recently as last summer she was throwing her support behind another party: Britain First.
Britain First is not simply a right-wing group, in the manner of Reform. It is an explicitly far-right party, whose co-leader, Ashlea Simon, believes black people cannot be English. Simon’s name might ring a bell for Mill readers; she was also a member of the Churchill’s Lions group, alongside long-time Mill favourite Lee Twamley, who were hanging Union and St George’s flags around Manchester and Salford last summer.
Again, Goodwin is not realistically going to vet every single person who turns up to leaflet with him. There’s certainly no suggesting he is himself a supporter of Britain First. But again, he was unwilling to condemn them when asked questions.
Alanna Vine, who was expelled from the Conservative Party in 2022, has also been out campaigning with Goodwin. One of the posts she shared that contributed to her suspension by her old party? “How many mosques have secret arsenals? Just waiting for when our troops are elsewhere in the world”.
Another said an area of Manchester “is now like being in Somalia”, before declaring: “There are now 1000’s & 1000’s of them. Seeing is believing, they live no differently than they did in Somalia. [The UK] is finished!” We asked Matt Goodwin if he shared the view that parts of Manchester are now like being in Somalia, or indeed that mosques have secret weapons they intend to deploy when the British Army has its head turned, but again we got no response.
A Conservative party spokesperson explained at the time that Vine was “expelled from the party over social media posts which were deemed discriminatory towards those of the Islamic faith”. In July 2023, Vine posted on social media that she had joined Reform UK.
Jacqui Harris, the chair of Reform’s Kenilworth and Southam branch, has also been seen canvassing for Goodwin. He was pictured with her recently, both smiling, his arm over her shoulder. Harris stood for Reform in the 2024 general election during which time she drew controversy, after the Campaign Against Antisemitism found she had promoted a number of posts comparing the modern state of Israel to Nazi Germany.
Harris appears to be something of a conspiracy theorist. As Sky News reported, in March 2019 she said a post, which claimed allegations of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn were “a false flag, probably masterminded by mossad/cia”, was “spot on”. In December that year, she also liked and shared a post which suggested Donald Trump is an Israeli “puppet”. The post linked to an article which claimed: “All the credible, independent, and objective evidence proves that Israel and the United States were behind 9/11. Despite the fact that the Zionist controlled US mainstream media simply ignores all the evidence.”
Harris was previously a Conservative councillor and was suspended from the party in 2019 amid allegations of antisemitism. She was later cleared, before being suspended again in 2020. Matt Goodwin refused to comment on her views — or whether he agrees with them.
All of these posts have been shared with Matt Goodwin’s campaign team (as well as posts from Lorenzo More, a Reform councillor in Lancashire who has also been campaigning in Gorton and Denton, who posted his view that Muslims are in the West to “conquer” it in 2023), but we have received no response. Nor did any of the other individuals named respond to our requests for comment.
We’ve also requested a sit down interview with Matt Goodwin, during which we would have raised these points in person, but have yet to hear back.
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