Writer, anchor, pizzaboy, politician? The Reformation of Matt Goodwin

Good morning Millers, it's time for the final edition of our by-election three-parter, in which we've been profiling the major candidates in the race. So far, we've brought you Jack D's interview with Labour's Angeliki Stogia and Ophira's experiences out door-knocking with the Green's Hannah Spencer. Which only leaves Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin, perhaps the trickiest of the three to approach, largely because he doesn't want to give us the time of day.

Alas, we shan't be deterred so easily. Jack W gave up his weekend in Denton searching for Goodwin, just in order for us to complete the set. As with the Spencer and Stogia pieces, this one is totally free to read (although you will need to be signed up as a free Mill subscriber to do so). We believe that quality local political coverage is vital for Greater Manchester’s democracy, and that every voter in Gorton and Denton — indeed, every voter in Greater Manchester — should have access to in-depth coverage.

The Reformation of Matt Goodwin

In the window of my rented Airbnb, on a residential street near the centre of Denton, I place a sign, with four thick lumps of Blu Tack. It reads: “Matthew pls say hi”. Then, for an extra flourish, I tear the cover from my copy of Value, Voices and Virtue – Matthew Goodwin’s 2023 takedown of the “new elite” – and add it to the window display. Then I prepare to wait.

Matt Goodwin won’t talk to me. He has ignored my interview requests, informed his team not to talk to journalists, and he didn’t even show up at the hustings I attended at the start of the Gorton and Denton by-election campaign. But I’d promised Mill readers a profile of Matt Goodwin, so, always good to my word, I’ve moved into a Denton semi for the weekend, in a bid to lure Matt Goodwin to me.

At first, I thought it was personal. After a video of me talking about his erstwhile campaign manager’s history of racist and antisemitic tweets went mildly viral in Reform Facebook circles, I assumed mine was a face Reform were specifically giving a wide berth. But when The Mill sent a freelance journalist to try and talk to Reform canvassers last week he too was rebuffed, and turned away from Reform HQ by security. Whatever we try, Matt Goodwin won’t talk to us.

We’ve reported plenty on Goodwin’s campaign in the past two weeks; most notably the law-breaking letter from a “concerned pensioner” they distributed in Denton and the coterie of naked racists and antisemites out canvassing for him (making comments like: “I would never touch a Jewish woman”). But I wanted to understand the man himself — and what formed him. This isn’t the easiest task. As a former close friend tells me: “He’s told a lot of different stories to different people about his past”. 

The man who was

Getting the people who once knew Matt Goodwin to speak ill of Matt Goodwin is the easy bit. Over the past few weeks, as the Reform candidate, who has always been a heat-seeking missile for any kind of media attention, has been talked about with a constancy more restless than ever, the people who once knew Goodwin have stepped forth in solemn, off-record duty, to speak ill of the man they once knew. 

And so, as I spent the final days of last week rattling off emails to academics Goodwin worked alongside in his former career – whose previous associations with him are often now a source of embarrassment – I came armed with one question first and foremost: What did you once like about Matt Goodwin?

Let’s head to the Potsdam Conference: 2009, Uni of Nottingham, back when Goodwin was a political researcher. Goodwin was in fine fettle, until he “got lost” and spent the night bumbling around the outskirts of Berlin with no clue how to get home. Eventually he hailed a 100 euro taxi journey, and made a colleague pay the bill upon his arrival because his credit card had run out. Another colleague — from his stint at the University of Manchester — recalls his relish for an evening out. “I’ve never spent more time in Manchester’s wine bars than with Matt Goodwin,” he says, before pondering what that says about Goodwin’s newfound man-of-the-people image.

Goodwin, I’m told, was “gregarious, and fun”, despite his obvious self-obsession. He was useless at poker, too, and earned himself the nickname ‘Two Jacks’ after he blurted out a great hand mid-game out of excitement. “Everyone cleaned him up,” laughs a former colleague, describing how they used to “send him off to the cashpoint” at the end of the night. His indiscretion extended to his love life. He was once chucked out of a south Manchester book club after two of the women who attended found out that he was sleeping with the other. It’s not clear whether this tale, recounted by another former colleague, is meant to lionise Goodwin or speak to his now well-recognised untrustworthiness.

It’s notable, of course, that this is all entirely off-record. Because it seems that if there’s one thing more shameful in academia than slagging off a former colleague, it’s being nice about Matt Goodwin.

“He was incredibly bright, and self-centred, and focused,” recalls a colleague at Nottingham who once knew Goodwin well. “Of course, he didn’t listen to a fucking thing”. The colleague remembers the Goodwin he knew fondly though. And this is a theme. Most of the six former colleagues I speak to recall the man they did know well. They liked him, even if they didn’t quite trust him. Now, of course, they only speak ill of him — they can’t believe the man they once knew has turned into, in the words of one, “an extremist basically as bad as anything the BNP ever had”. 

But the 2026 Goodwin, the one standing to be the next MP for Gorton and Denton, tells a very different story about his academia years. His version is of a man who never fit into the lily-livered, liberal academic circles he was placed in. A man whose eventual departure from that world, as a voice of the disenfranchised white-working class, was in-built from the start.

Revolt on the right

It’s midday; Saturday, no sign of him at the Airbnb. My sign is missing something. I pull it down and carefully add a pair of puckered red lips, before repositioning it in the window. Meanwhile, each page-turn of Values, Voices, and Virtue is beginning to feel like having scaled a monolithic cliff-face, only to find another monolithic cliff-face (the next page of writing) awaiting you beyond the precipice. A notification on my phone alerts me to the fact that a far-right march is sharking through Manchester city centre; six miles north-west of Denton. 

My new neighbours have Goodwin posters in their windows, as does one other house in the close containing roughly a dozen properties. There are no Labour or Green window-posters, and a woman washing her car down the road tells me she’s seen no sign of any of the candidates — “and thank god”.

The Manchester Evening News are reporting that a fight has broken out at the rally; two men trading punches. It’s later reported that 11 arrests have been made by police: two of them on suspicion of assaulting emergency workers. The last time I was at one of those events, last Summer, I witnessed an inebriated man ask that Donald Trump buy England, and met a man called Steve who told me he could move between the planes of reality with his mind. Both this march and that one were organised by Britain First, an explicitly far-right organisation whose higher-ups tend not to believe that black people can be English. My march was well attended — so is this one.