Matthew Goodwin, Reform and the politics of resentment

“I just spent four days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the west. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos. And now I’ve just landed back in the UK.”

It wasn’t unusual during the 1930s to hear credulity like this from flatterers and scribblers returning from the east. Such reveries would usually draw on utopian ideology. A new civilisation was being built; the riddle of history had been solved; it was important to spread the good news. 

But what’s Matthew Goodwin’s excuse? The 43-year-old former academic and fellow at the Chatham House thinktank made the above remarks after a trip to Hungary in the summer of 2024. They were subsequently shared online by Balázs Orbán, political director to the prime minister, Viktor Orbán (the two are not related). 

Goodwin is far from the first conservative to make a pilgrimage to Budapest. Hungary’s authoritarian, nationalist regime holds an irresistible charm for many on the right. Ever since Orbán’s Fidesz party first came to power in 2010, Hungary has been feted for holding the line against immigration, progressivism and “globalism”. The Danube Institute, a government-sponsored thinktank, is run by John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher. Meanwhile the Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton accepted “honours” from Orbán in 2019, and has been canonised by the regime since his death in 2020. 

Yet Goodwin makes for a strange counter-revolutionary tourist. Until a few years ago, he presented himself as a cerebral foe of the authoritarian right, chastising ministers for “dismissing the far right as too weak and disorganised to mount a major security threat”. From his academic perch, he authored books on the British National Party (BNP) and the UK Independence Party (Ukip). Between 2013 and 2015, he served as an adviser to the government on tackling anti-Muslim hatred.

Shortly after that, Goodwin went on what in politics is euphemistically called a  journey. Gone were the excursions into the dark heart of right-wing radicalisation. Gradually the political scientist began to metamorphose into the fire-breathing pugilist we see today. 

What prompted a promising academic to throw it all away in the name of becoming a propagandist for the radical right? Goodwin’s story is not without pathos. Following a stint as an associate professor of politics at the University of Nottingham, he joined the University of Kent in 2015, becoming one of the youngest professors in the country. Almost a decade later came the fall. “My professorship–everything I had ever wanted, everything I had worked for–was over,” Goodwin writes of his departure from academia in the summer of 2024, when he took voluntary severance from Kent.

Some see Goodwin’s political realignment as entirely self-serving, a way to make a killing by churning out reactionary agitprop, along with other renegade scholars. Others see a series of minor setbacks as having wounded his pride, warping and curdling his politics. One former colleague described Goodwin to me as “brittle” and unable to distinguish between academic disagreement (a normal part of campus life) and personal attacks. Others have accused Goodwin of “going native” among those he had originally set out to research. 

Evidence for the culture war is to be found in his professional setbacks, such as failing to secure research grants

Much of Goodwin’s transmogrification revolves around the university. In this he is hardly unusual: complaints about campus radicalisation have been a staple of right-wing polemic for many decades. It is a breathless genre of discourse, in which universities are depicted as hotbeds of subversion dominated by radicals intent on the destruction of traditional morality. “Our universities are the training grounds for the barbarians of the future,” wrote the right-wing writer and critic Jack Schwartzman in 1951. Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, similarly deplored the way that universities were succumbing to a form of relativism that was precipitating a “crisis of civilisation”. 

Bad Education: Why Our Universities are Broken and How We Can Fix Them (2025) represents Goodwin’s own, modest foray into the voluminous right-wing literature on campus politics. His narrative is wearily familiar. Universities are accused of moving “sharply and radically to the left”. In keeping with a more contemporary style, however, political events are portrayed by Goodwin in an unfailingly narcissistic key. Evidence for the culture war is to be found in his professional setbacks, such as finding it more difficult to publish academic papers and secure research grants as his politics drift steadily to the right. 

He draws on a series of populist clichés to explain why he decided to “blow up” his career as a professor. Goodwin’s academic colleagues were restless and unhappy because of Brexit. They saw it as an irredeemable disaster, the people who voted for it as bigots or dupes. Rather than try to understand the disadvantaged communities that voted to leave the EU, they were more interested in buttressing their egos with feelings of supercilious contempt. Moreover, Goodwin believes his academic ambitions were thwarted because he refused to bow to the “cult-like worship of the European Union on campus”. 

Little or no evidence is offered for any of these accusations: we are simply meant to take Goodwin’s word for it. Victimhood has been part of the conservative creed ever since the French Revolution, and Bad Education is little more than an extended excursion in self-pity. The author claims to have been subjected to “a sustained campaign of abuse, intimidation and harassment, equivalent to how a religious cult treats a heretic”. One emerges with the strong impression of a person for whom perceived slights or imagined intrigues become sources of lifelong resentment. “Even my own head of school liked a tweet insulting me,” he writes at one point in the book. “After reading this, it is highly likely that the established universities will never hire me and my former academic colleagues will never speak to me again.”

In Bad Education, Goodwin also furnishes the reader with a list of right-wingers who have been “sacked or mistreated on campus for holding unorthodox views”. It reads like a who’s who of international reaction, including a young academic who tried to rehabilitate race “science” and another who is a proponent of white “racial self-interest”.

But then, getting “cancelled” can be good business. Indeed, there has always been money on the table for the liberal who claims to have been mugged by reality. The most employable person in conservative circles today is usually the one who makes the loudest claim to have been rendered unemployable. 

Thus, while Goodwin might claim to be a “pariah on campus”, his own “cancellation”—like that of so many others—has opened up a lucrative new world among the “heterodox intellectuals” who blame liberal elites for their own lack of mainstream recognition. 

However, I don’t think it was just me who was a disappointment to Goodwin. “Today, most of my friends are on the right, not the left. Most of the writers I find interesting are on the right, not the left. Most of the arguments that I find compelling are on the right, not the left. And now, as much as possible, I go out of my way to avoid socialising with other academics and stepping near a university campus,” he would later write in Bad Education. Goodwin was also on his way to bigger things by that point: not long after I met him, he would be given his own show by GB News, a platform ideally suited to his increasingly incendiary rhetoric. 

Goodwin’s State of the Nation programme, which he presents with the former Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, goes out at 8pm every weeknight. Goodwin ought to be in his ideological element among the big mouths of right-wing TV, yet he lacks the telegenic charisma of his GB News stablemate Nigel Farage, and often cuts a gloomy figure. He talks in a somewhat demagogic register, issuing “demands” on behalf of “the British people” (his employer portentously bills itself as “the people’s channel”) and falling back on Manichean distinctions between “us” and “them”. What he does understand is the populist lingua franca: he knows when to play the tough-talking pundit and when to bleat in injured tones about how difficult it is to be a white man in Keir Starmer’s Britain. 

The stakes on campus may be famously low, but social media has the power to launch a reputation into the stratosphere. This is why various academics can today be found moonlighting as influencers. Some destroy their reputations along the way. Others bolster them. Many do both. In terms of online metrics at least, Goodwin is riding high. As he regularly informs readers of his eponymous newsletter, he has 80,200 subscribers from 181 countries, making it “one of the UK’s most popular Substacks”. 

The content strongly resembles the material put out by some of the radical-right groups he once held in scholarly contempt. It purports to give a voice to the “forgotten majority” while revealing “what PEOPLE really think”. Poorly designed polls are regularly marshalled to push a set of wearily predictable reactionary ideas (People Polling, a company of which Goodwin is listed as a director, was the least accurate pollster at the 2024 election). The “public mood” and the “will of the people” are similarly deployed as cudgels for those same beliefs. Accuracy—the sine qua non of academic research—seems to have been supplanted by inflammatory anecdotes and cherrypicked data. Some posts feature terrifying headlines and standfirsts nestled alluringly above a paywall. “Am I a terrorist?” reads one. “How the British state views opposition to mass immigration as an indicator of terrorist ideology”.

Goodwin wrote his PhD thesis on the BNP. These days, however, he appears to share at least some of the now defunct party’s fixation on demography. “White Britons will become a minority in this country in the year 2063,” reads one of Goodwin’s recent Substack pieces. This was presented as a “bombshell finding” and a “demographic crisis”. However, Goodwin’s definition of white British for the purposes of his report was so narrow as to be almost meaningless: it excluded anyone with an immigrant parent, meaning that, following its logic, neither Winston Churchill nor King Charles would count as white British. 

Goodwin isn’t the only person on the right who has been seeking to foreground a bogus distinction between white British citizens and Britons born outside the UK (but who nevertheless possess British citizenship), and indeed Britons who are not white. Robert Jenrick, a former Tory leadership candidate and justice secretary, has lamented the decline of the “white British” population. David Goodhart, the head of demography, immigration and integration at Policy Exchange and founder of this magazine, has similarly bemoaned the decline of London’s white British population. “Is there some minimum number of natives that a capital requires before it ceases to be the capital?” he asked in the pages of the London Standard in June. Back in February, the right-wing podcaster Konstantin Kisin claimed that former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, couldn’t be English because he was a “brown Hindu”. 

On GB News in 2024, Goodwin claimed that: “More than 50 per cent of social housing in London is occupied by people who are not British. This is not acceptable.” He was drawing on data from the 2021 census that found 376,700 lead tenants in social housing in London had been born overseas. But “born overseas” and “not British” are different things. Once again, Goodwin seems to have been eliding the distinction between foreign-born citizens and foreigners—a distinction at odds with the British model of citizenship. Such rhetoric also goes against Goodwin’s purported desire to see migrants to Britain “integrate fully” and not live “parallel lives”. Implying that second- and third-generation migrants will never be truly British is a strange way of going about it. As politics professor, Reith lecturer and a columnist for this magazine Ben Ansell has pertinently asked: “Why [in the reading of Goodwin and others] do non-ethnically white British citizens count for less?” 

Goodwin’s output these days is characterised by what the historian Richard Hofstadter once called the “paranoid style”. His writing increasingly comes across as a combination of exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy. The paranoid style detects “betrayal from on high” with traditional values being “eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals”. For Goodwin, the UK is being betrayed by an “elite class”, which he defines as “an assortment of left-wing academics, journalists, and thinktankers I worked with more than a decade ago”. Goodwin’s aversion to this class seems to be personal as well as political. At various points in his written work, he blames a coterie of mutual backscratchers for his failure to secure a politics professorship at one of London’s elite universities. Instead, Goodwin was forced to marinate in his own resentment at a “non-elite” institution (his words) in Kent.

Goodwin believes it is the liberal elite, rather than him, that has become radicalised. In his 2023 book, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, he claims that this new elite has declared a culture war against the British people. A “middle class graduate elite” is accused of imposing a “radically progressive” outlook on the UK over the past 40 years. Liberal celebrities, such as Carol Vorderman and Gary Lineker, are defined as members of this new elite with “total dominance over the commanding heights of politics, culture and society”, whereas incumbent Tory cabinet members are not.

While Goodwin’s politics have become more radioactive over the years, those looking for evidence of a noble mind overthrown will come away disappointed. Indeed, Goodwin’s account of his former commitment to the liberal left comes across as trite and superficial.  

“I walked around campus wearing T-shirts with Che Guevara on them”, he recalls. “I routinely changed my Facebook profile picture to signal my concern about whatever had just upset liberals … I made sure my tweets included the latest fashionable hashtag.” 

With that in mind, when Goodwin today accuses academics of “signalling their allegiance to the latest fashionable cause” one must assume he is speaking from experience.

Goodwin’s earlier work on Ukip and the BNP was well received across the political spectrum. In 2014 he authored Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain with his colleague Rob Ford. The book, which traced Ukip’s ascent in the polls, was longlisted for the Orwell prize. The two academics have since parted ways. “I haven’t had any direct contact with him for a few years now,” Ford told me when we spoke on the phone. He described the Goodwin he used to know, whom he still talks about fondly, as “ambitious, driven and very focused on building his media profile”.

How can we square Goodwin’s complaints about university life becoming “profoundly illiberal” with his pilgrimages to Hungary, a self-proclaimed illiberal democracy? In what sense is Orbán’s dismantling of academic institutions—the country’s universities are overseen by government appointees chosen for their loyalty—motivated by a desire for “viewpoint diversity”? 

That self-described proponents of free speech like Goodwin should end up carrying water for authoritarians such as Orbán is less complicated than it might seem. The radical right in the UK and the United States is currently engaged in a culture war against public institutions. This war includes universities, courts and sections of the media that haven’t already been captured by corporate interests. A posture of victimhood is just one of the tactics used in this wider assault on progressive values. As Goodwin freely concedes in Bad Education, he isn’t necessarily opposed to the state intervening in university life, just so long as it intervenes to protect the beliefs of people like him. 

It was around this time that Goodwin began to fall back on populist rhetoric with greater frequency. “Disillusioned and disgruntled, over the last decade the forgotten masses have been staging a counter-revolution, rallying around national populism, Brexit, Boris Johnson and a very different brand of post-Brexit conservatism,” as Goodwin would go on to write in Values, Voice and Virtue. This political “realignment” was being powered by those who felt “cut adrift by the elite”. 

The conservative movement has always drawn strength from its adaptability, and Goodwin isn’t the only one who has embarked on an ideological journey. A political realignment in the US has seen the party of Ronald Reagan become the party first of Pat Buchanan and then of Trump, as John Ganz shows in his book When the Clock Broke (2024). Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, first gained prominence with a book that sought to explain the pathologies of poor white people. At the time he wrote Hillbilly Elegy (2016), Vance despised Trump; he even went so far as to compare him to Hitler in a conversation with an old college roommate. But the likes of Vance and Goodwin are what the political philosopher Vlad Vexler has accurately identified as political entrepreneurs. Such a person “surfs the political landscape for self-advancement. They are not positively out to break the democratic game, but if that is the price of self-advancement, so be it”. To political entrepreneurs, principles are contingent. They see which way the wind is blowing and pivot accordingly.

For a time, Goodwin found it serviceable to romanticise the big state of Britain’s postwar economy. He styled himself as a working-class Tory who was able to straddle the ideological ground between groups including Blue Labour and the “one nation” Conservatives clustered around Theresa May and Boris Johnson. In a 2020 Daily Mail article, Goodwin told of his upbringing in a terraced house in St Albans, in a “single-parent, working-class family where money was always a problem”. The origins of Goodwin’s politics lie partly in a dysfunctional childhood and, thereafter, in a hunger and thirst for approval. He was bullied at school, and his dad walked out on the family when he was five. His subsequent ideological comportment—presented as a product of his hard-knock upbringing—was “left on the economy, right on culture”. 

Those were Goodwin’s principles until such a time as he found new ones. “There is no major difference between Labour & the Conservatives,” Goodwin tweeted in March 2024. “Both are committed to a high-tax, big-state, mass immigration economy which is delivering low growth, dismal GDP-per-head, low productivity and terrible public services.” He repeated the claim during an appearance on BBC Question Time earlier this year, where he accused the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, of “imposing” a “big-state, big-spending economic model” on the country.

One unintended consequence of Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter, now X, has been the growing alienation of conservative pundits from mainstream opinion. This was in evidence during the disorder that broke out in parts of England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the summer of 2024. In late July, bands of racist thugs used the murder of three little girls in Southport as an excuse to go on the rampage. Ethnic minorities were targeted, mosques were pelted with bricks and cars, and homes were vandalised. In one stomach-turning incident, a crowd in Rotherham set fire to a Holiday Inn Express while asylum seekers were trapped inside. “Block the doors!” the mob chanted.

While most of the country watched the riots unfold with horror, Goodwin—together with a number of right-wing intellectuals—looked on with something approaching schadenfreude. In an interview with GB News, he objected to the description of the rioters as “far right”, and claimed they were “protesting illegal migration, the collapse of our border and being lied to”. At every opportunity Goodwin emphasised that the Southport suspect—who was born in Wales—was a “child of Rwandan immigrants”. 

On 5th August 2024, he told watchers of GB News: “If we’re going to pretend this is about the far right, rather than this groundswell of opposition on issues where the British people have been lied to, then this is going to escalate.” 

In his determination to elide the distinction between the majority and a noisy minority, Goodwin used X to fire off a volley of misleading polling data. “More than two-thirds of British people, 67 per cent, say ‘immigration policy’ is responsible for the riots, protests & unrest (YouGov)”, Goodwin tweeted on 7th August. 

The younger Goodwin would probably have hesitated before making such sweeping claims about the British people. While a majority of respondents to the poll Goodwin cited did say that immigration policy “bears some responsibility” for the disorder, many more blamed the far right and social media. Moreover, there was little public support for either the rioters or the broader protests. Just 12 per cent of those polled thought the disorder was justified, while only one in six saw those who took part as having “legitimate concerns” (a favourite phrase of Goodwin’s). Sixty-five per cent agreed with the description of them as “rioters”, while 58 per cent believed they were “racist”; 52 per cent believed they were “far right”. 

Soothsaying has never been Goodwin’s strongest suit. In 2015 he predicted that Ukip would win 12 seats at the general election, including one in Thurrock, where he claimed the seat was “in the bag”. Ukip went on to win just a single seat. Two years later, Goodwin ate pages of his own book on national television after saying Labour would never achieve a vote share of 38 per cent in the 2017 general election. He predicted a Remain victory, and that Trump would lose in 2016 and win in 2020. 

A foray into party politics could beckon. He is precisely the sort who could make a name for himself  in these strange days

Goodwin endorsed Kemi Badenoch’s campaign in the 2022 Tory leadership contest. Yet within three years he had written her off and thrown his support behind Reform and Farage. No doubt with one eye on certain members of his audience, Goodwin seems to have drawn attention to the leader of the opposition’s distinctly non-Anglo-Saxon name: “While the idea of Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch was always deeply seductive to a certain kind of Tory—white, baby boomer, Oxbridge graduate, status-conscious, morally righteous, loves having their conservative beliefs projected back to them by a black woman—the idea of Kemi Badenoch is definitely not igniting the same reaction out there in the wider country.” 

Goodwin’s type—so-called heterodox intellectual turned populist demagogue—is a morbid symptom of the digital age. To paraphrase Albert Camus, he is an empty prophet for mediocre times. A selection of glossy headshots on Goodwin’s website suggests a foray into party politics could at some point beckon. That was certainly the view of at least one former academic colleague I spoke to. And why not? Goodwin is precisely the sort who could make a name for himself in these strange days. What Goodwin lacks in charisma he makes up for in self-promotion. 

And yet, for those of us who once enjoyed his work, Goodwin now cuts a rather pathetic figure, his ideological trajectory recalling the American journalist Dorothy Thompson’s description of the “saturnine man” in her 1941 Harper’s essay “Who Goes Nazi?”: “He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him.” 

The title of Thompson’s essay over-eggs it, but what’s clear is that personality has driven Goodwin’s rightward journey every bit as much as politics. The result is a man who today shares much of the worldview of the individuals he once researched.

“There is a serious possibility of a political revolution under Nigel Farage’s leadership of Reform UK,” Goodwin preened on his GB News show earlier this year. Goodwin has even been eyeing a role as home secretary in a hypothetical Reform government. And yet this current iteration of Goodwin may well turn out to be as ephemeral as the others. With Farage intent on cleaning up his act in the hope of breaking the two-party system, and Goodwin increasingly in hock to the demographic-obsessed audience of his Substack, such sycophantic overtures to the Reform UK leader may fall on deaf ears. Goodwin’s journey to the outer reaches of the right may not yet have run its course.