Matt Goodwin and the end of England

How one man's career explains our public life.

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

The most important thing about Matt Goodwin is how boring he is.

This is not how he is usually covered. He has had an unusual career path, from an academic who studied the populist right to a member of the populist right who sneers at academics. So naturally we tend to cover him with headlines like Gone Native or Matt Goodwin’s Fall Into the Abyss. I myself wrote that he “became his own doctoral thesis”.

It’s a compelling narrative. And because it’s a compelling narrative, it serves to obscure the much more central fact about Goodwin, which is that he is very boring. Anyone who has had the misfortune of reading one of his books will know this. Leadened prose, dum-de-dum-de-dum writing style, without beauty, or wit, or humour, or any insight into human connection. A kind of flattened intellectual mesa, on which he carefully positions several layers of vaguely misrepresented statistical data.

He is also very tedious in person. Watching him talk is like being accosted by a man on the train on your way home from work, sat hunched against the wall of the carriage in a cheap suit, nursing a can of Carling, desperate to complain about the staff.

Nigel Farage is a good speaker. He sounds honest, matter of fact, jovial. It’s all bollocks of course, but he’s nailed the part. Even Piers Morgan, whose current career trajectory is really not dissimilar to Goodwin’s, has a kind of manic hectoring energy to him. Goodwin just sounds like what he is. A mid-market mind, tortured by his history of failure, and unaware of the vast personal and psychological defects which explain it.

Finally, he is tedious in his ideas. His arguments are inevitably presented with a dramatic headline - The Great Realignment, or The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. But when you dig into them, it’s just the same old message we’ve heard since 2016, without any further elaboration or complexity. The People are fundamentally conservative and hostile to change. The Elite is fundamentally progressive and loves change. In 2016, these ideas felt exotic and dangerous. Now? Now it’s just the same old shit.

So the question about Goodwin isn’t what happened to him. It is a different question altogether. It is to ask how someone so boring could do so well. And that question tells us a great deal about how this country functions. It lifts the lid on a vast and very well funded right-wing eco-system, which spreads certain ideas and suffocates others. It helps explain why we are where we are.

Goodwin was always very ambitious. This is usually the first thing anyone with memory of his early career says about him. It’s the first thing mentioned in any account of his life - like this one, which is probably the best, and this one, which is also very good. He wanted promotion in academia, he wanted to sell lots of books, he wanted to get on the telly. In 2010, he went from a research position at the University of Manchester to an associate professorship in University of Nottingham. In 2015, he became professor of politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent - quite an accomplishment while still in his 30s.

He was the right guy for the moment, the person who could claim to understand the social and electoral forces underlying the rise of the populist right just as it exploded onto the front pages. The next few years must have been giddy. He was made associate fellow at Chatham House, senior fellow at UK in a Changing Europe, founding director of the Centre for UK Prosperity in the Legatum Institute. He started popping up regularly on TV news and radio. He began doing lucrative after-dinner speeches.

Then, in summer 2024, Goodwin’s academic career ended. He removed any mention of University of Kent from his social media accounts, while the institution stated that Goodwin “left the University of his own accord”. Perhaps he simply decided he was going to branch out. Or perhaps they tried to end the association as elegantly and quietly as they could, given his repeated provocative outbursts. Who knows.

Either way, he started a new career as a full-time populist-right rabble rouser. He joined Jacob Rees-Mogg on the State of the Nation programme on GB News, taking over his presenting duties three days a week. He was made honorary president of Reform’s student wing. His Substack secured tens of thousands of subscribers. His books became Sunday Times bestsellers. He amassed a quarter of a million followers on X.com. This week, a career-peak, he was unveiled as Reform’s candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. It’s unlikely, but perfectly possible, that he will soon be a member of parliament.

For a long time, the extremism of Goodwin’s ideas was hidden behind his writing. He used two techniques. The first was to write so badly, so tediously, that you really gave up paying close attention. This was partly through lumpen prose. But it was also through downright silliness and conceptual infantilism. I mean, consider this passage, from his book Values, Voice and Virtue:

“In the past, the old elite used to signal their status and social superiority through delicate and restrictive clothing such as tuxedos and top hats and by engaging in time consuming leisure activities which manual workers did not have the time to do such as playing golf, visiting galleries and museums and going on very long holidays.” What on earth am I reading, you wonder. What kind of semi-literate gibberish is this? “Today, in sharp contrast, the new elite has decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.” When you read page after page of this stuff - broad, unfalsifiable, hazy, basically meaningless - your brain begins to separate, like someone daydreaming while driving a car. The front half stays connected to the eyes, taking in information and moving down the page. But the back part does really start to give in, intuitively aware that nothing of any importance is taking place and using the opportunity to rest.

His second technique is to hide behind polling data. Goodwin almost never states what his own views are. He is too cowardly for that. Instead, he projects all the things he likes onto the white working class and projects all the things he hates onto the elite. It’s a puppet show, with the Elite doll hitting the People doll with a toy club, but all the voices coming from Goodwin himself, as he crouches behind the booth.

The people of the new elite, he tells us, believe in the “free and equal interaction of people and support those who do not conform to conventional ways of life - such as racial, sexual and gender minorities”. Traditionalists, on the other hand, “want to live in a society where these hierarchies are upheld”.

It’s in these sorts of passages that Goodwin’s true mind starts to come into focus. Once you realise that these labels are not real socio-economic categories but simply receptacles for his own likes and dislikes, once the veneer of political science is brushed away and the monologue revealed in its true form, it becomes quite disturbing. Decoded, de-Goodwinised, he is saying that he does not believe in “the free and equal interaction of people”, he does not want to support “racial, sexual and gender minorities”. What began as a man saying that the white working class had conservative views on immigration metastasises into a really quite comprehensive personal world view based on inequality, lack of rights, dislike of minorities, social obedience and racial control.

Slowly but surely, that personal world view then began to emerge publicly. During the 2024 riots, as people tried to burn asylum seekers alive, he wrote a Substack entitled: “What did you expect?” The riots were triggered by the murder of three children in Southport by a British-born man. “Who murdered them?” Goodwin asked. “The son of immigrants from Rwanda.” Last year, following a stabbing on a train, he adopted the same technique. First, he blamed “mass uncontrolled immigration”. When someone said that the suspects were born in the UK, Goodwin replied: “So were all of the 7/7 bombers. It takes more than a piece of paper to make somebody ‘British’”.

He pours fuel on the fire whenever there is an outbreak of violence. He works to turn crime stories into immigration stories. He has a strong racial component to his view of nationhood. There is something very dark and ancient and vicious in his worldview. It turns out that tediousness is not his greatest defect.

Perhaps Goodwin was always like this and hid it during his years as a seemingly reasonable academic. Or perhaps he really was a reasonable academic, and was gradually radicalised by the thing he was studying. Who knows? Who cares? Life is short and we must not squander it wandering in the psychological wastelands of deeply average people.

The Goodwin story tells us very little about him. But it tells us a lot about how this country operates.

There is no well funded, expansive, career-boosting media ecosystem for intellectual rigour, for careful judgement, for objective assessments of complicated phenomena. For an ambitious man like Goodwin, that initial approach was limited. But there is a thriving, well-remunerated ecosystem for right-wing provocation.

A key financial supporter of that ecosystem is the hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall. He has an estimated net worth of £875 million. He has used this money to purchase various outlets on the right. He is now the owner of GB News, UnHerd and The Spectator.

For such a wealthy man, he has a strangely poor sense of what would be a profit-making venture. The Spectator generated £2.9 million in earnings in 2022. It was valued at around £40 million. Marshall paid £100 million. GB News made losses of £30.7 million in 2021-22, £42.4 million in 2022-23 and £33.4 million in 2023-24. He pumps the money in. Again, not a sensible financial decision. More likely, these are political projects, designed to spread political ideas and advance political agendas.

Once Goodwin began speaking in a more extreme way, he was able to find a home in this eco-system, through a presenter slot on GB News. He was able to secure full page comment pieces in the Mail. X’s owner, Elon Musk, has rigged the algorithm so that the site promotes right-wing anti-immigrant content and buries moderate content. This helps spread Goodwin’s message even further, driving an audience to his Substack.

There, he will experience audience capture. At Kent university, his financial status was disconnected from his political status. He was paid a salary regardless of his views. Now that has changed. What would happen if he conceded a point on immigration? What would happen if he wrote a piece in which he said that second-generation immigrants were English. He would alienate a portion of the subscribers. He would lose revenue. But what happens if he issues ever more extreme propositions? He secures a larger audience. He wins more revenue.

His financial incentives therefore point against any nuance in his views and demand an ever more extreme articulation of his original position.

Once upon a time, we would expect this to drive him further into the intellectual underground, lost and forgotten in the great shouty bollockfest of the terminally online. But this is no longer the case. Now, there is the eco-system. Now there is a Reform party which can take really quite extreme racial rhetoric and launder it, turning someone into a mainstream politician, their pale skin gleaming under the camera’s eye.

And now he is a parliamentary party candidate. He will go on TV more. He might take part in a televised debate. He will sit on the Newsnight sofa. He will reach an even bigger audience.

There is a key point to recognise here. He is not succeeding despite his extreme views. He’s a deeply average man: boring to read, boring to listen to, boring to watch. He does not possess the kind of livewire megawatt charisma, or canny sense of social intuition, or loyalty-stimulating cult leader gravitas, that would allow him to conquer these profound social defects. It is quite the opposite. He is succeeding precisely because of his extreme views. He is rewarded for them: on X, on Substack, in the pages of the right-wing tabloids, on TV news channels, and in mainstream electoral life.

A culture is defined by the set of incentives which operate within it. We might tell ourselves that Britain is about moderation, reason, and fairness. But the Goodwin story reveals that those values are in fact ignored or punished. Instead, we reward people for betraying them. This is not a story about Matt Goodwin. It’s about the kind of country we’re becoming and why it’s happening.

This week’s newsletter is available as a podcast, which you can listen to at the top of the page or by subscribing on Spotify.

I had a couple of columns in the i paper this week. The first made the case for rejoining the EU. The second was on the superficial spectacle of the Labour leadership race. The paper has a very good deal on subscriptions right now, with an annual membership for just £20. The offer ends Monday - sign up here.

The Origin Story podcast is back up and running for the new year, with a Q&A episode exclusively for Patreon subscribers, covering issues raised in our Socialism season. You can sign up here to get access if you’re not a supporter already. There are also tickets on sale for our special live show in April - the biggest we’ve ever done. It’s going to be immense.

I’ve been reading Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry, which it turns out is rather difficult if you want to avoid crying on public transport. It’s a short, strangely readable account of the death of her father in law, just a few short days after his cancer diagnosis. He is the kind of Englishman you know. They will be in your life: hesitant, reserved, dignified, utterly benign. The account of the death is as interesting for the practical arrangements as it is emotionally ruinous. A beautiful, honest, clear-eyed, unsentimental and loving book.

Right, that’s it - fuck off you lot, see you next week.