Every Day He Eats the Book

This week: my god I want Matt Goodwin to lose. Also: a new way of seeing the world; and some very old work on a very old bus.

One of the greatest mistakes in the last decade of British media history – one of the greatest acts of cowardice, even – was made by a Sky News producer in June 2017. In the run up to the previous week’s election Matt Goodwin, who we could still then refer to as a professor of politics at the University of Kent rather than by whatever rather earthier and less professional terms we may be tempted to use now, had tweeted that he did not believe Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party would get 38%, and that he would eat his book if it did. In the event, it got 40%.

“I’m a man of my word,” Goodwin told the nation, after reminding us that his book was available from all the places one might buy such things. Then he tore a page out, stuffed it into his mouth and began to chew.

Here’s where the mistake was made: whoever was on duty that day at Sky cut away. Yes, Goodwin had only agreed to do this absurd thing as a cutesily self-deprecating way of promoting the existence of his book and suggesting he had a sense of humour about himself that has been strikingly absent since. Yes, he would no doubt have been furious if the camera had been allowed to just linger.

But my god, just imagine him trying to be taken seriously as a commentator, let alone a candidate, if there was footage of him realising what was happening and the colour draining from his face. Imagine being able to watch him face the choice of either running off camera or actually swallowing. I doubt it would have prevented all that’s happened since – a better example than Goodwin of how a vague but definite air of resentment can be a path to the nativist right you’d struggle to find – but at least we’d have the comfort of being able to watch it back.

I have given this a lot of thought, and: I really, really need Matt Goodwin to lose tomorrow’s Denton & Gorton by-election. For the good of us all, that man needs to be repudiated, and his ideas stomped into the dust.

It is not quite true to say it doesn’t matter whether it’s Labour or the Greens that win instead. Clearly it does, not just for the people of the constituency, but for the parties, the narrative, for when we schedule the next round of stories about Starmer’s leadership in crisis. But what is true is that I can’t bring myself to care that much. I don’t know the seat, I have friends campaigning for both sides, and I’ve heard good things about both their candidates. Whatever my issue with their leaderships and platforms right now, I would vote for either in a heartbeat to stop Matt Goodwin.

Much of this is because Reform, of course, are awful. Just this week they’ve promised an ICE-style agency to deport hundreds of thousands, a radical expansion of stop and search, an end to indefinite leave to remain, and fewer rights for renters. (All but one of those was from one speech.) Anything that’s bad news for Nigel Farage seems like good news to me.

But some of it, I admit, is an overwhelming distaste for Matt Goodwin himself. He has said, among other lovely things, that “Englishness is an ethnicity deeply rooted in people that can trace their roots back decades”; that “it takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British”; and that “Britain will be unrecognisable by the end of this century”. He’s also suggested people who don’t have children should pay more tax (counterpoint: f**k off), and employed a campaign manager who said he “wouldn’t touch a Jewish woman”. All these views are extremely bad. In the words of Joe Mulhall, of anti-extremism campaigners Hope Not Hate, “I can’t think of another example of someone as extreme as Goodwin winning an election in the UK.”¹

Even if his views didn’t matter, which obviously they do, he just doesn’t seem like a very nice person. In the last few days alone the headlines have included “Matt Goodwin’s academic project was debunked as ‘total garbage’” (Times) and “Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin faced GB News complaint over colleague’s claim of ‘inappropriate comments’” (Guardian). One is inescapably left wondering why so many former colleagues have felt moved to speak out.

Matt would no doubt blame the elitism that keeps the likes of him out of the halls of power, on the grounds that he blames everything that does so on that. (Things that do the opposite, of course, are not elitist at all, but an honest expression of the views of the British people.) Even leaving aside that such complaints gave him the air of a 44 year-old man still furious about the outcome of this UCAS form, it feels worth noting that any elite worthy of the name would surely include someone who had held not only senior higher education posts of the sort many other academics would kill for, but has also been attached to Chatham House, the Legatum Institute, and GB News, where he is a regular presenter.

But of course, being paid to spout illiberal views is inherently anti-elitism. Elitism, we are left to understand, is expressing liberal ones for free.

(If Matt wants to dismiss me as elite, incidentally, I would note that I have none of those sinecures, and also a mere fraction of his following on Substack. I prefer to deal with my seething resentment over such slights through the medium of a nice long walk.)

What scares me right now is that, despite all of that, it still feels unnervingly possible that he wins. At least some of the Labour vote, and a large chunk of the Green one, are motivated in large part by the urge to block the other. If that split in the anti-Reform vote were to allow Goodwin through, the Labour leadership might usefully reflect on how “You lefty pricks have to vote for us to stop Reform” might play out at a general election.

I have everything crossed that this won’t happen.When he whines that the liberal media is against him, he is not being paranoid: for the good of us all, I really, really want Matt Goodwin to lose. I don’t want someone who’s followed the retweets-to-radicalisation pipeline to have actual political power.

I want to wake up Friday morning, and find the book-eating is no longer the most embarrassing bit of film footage of Matt Goodwin – because now we can watch his concession speech.

Some content for the remainiacs in your life

Hey, have you ever had the urge to relive the politics of the Brexit years, in the manner of a child putting a hand in a flame to see how much it burns? Then do I have the book for you! Morgan Jones – one of the best writers covering the Labour party today – has published her first book, No Second Chances: The Inside Story of the Campaign for a Second EU Referendum.

It is, as I said when I was sent an advance copy, “A readable and very funny tour of a period that gave British politics PTSD”. Patrick Maguire meanwhile called it, “Sometimes hilarious, occasionally horrifying – but always fascinating.” The ideal gift for the EU beret wearer in your life.

Hey, sticking with the theme of both EU beret people and clever thoughtful writing delivered with wit and charm – the New World, a magazine for which I am lucky enough to be a columnist, is now on Substack. You can read their intro post here.

Why not give them a follow?

Map of the Week: Incredible vanishing Canada edition

An email from long-standing correspondent, Chris Sharp:

Hi Jonn,

Hope you are well and that your deadline isn’t looming too large. And if it is, sorry I mentioned it.

Yeah you’ll be sorry. Anyway, the reason Chris was emailing is because he’d been idly researching the UK’s population size, relative to the other nations of the world, as readers of this newsletter are wont to do, when he’d come across Our World in Data’s Cartogram of World Population, and had the following reaction:

Hell yeah.

And rightly so. I’ve seen that before. But with the deadline looming, I am in the market for interesting things I can show you without a thousand finely honed words, and this is the ideal example: