Matt Goodwin has been selected as the Reform UK candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton byelection – a contest he has a very good chance of winning. I suppose I miss the days when watching the toxic right was more of a cod-psychoanalytical pastime: when you could watch the Goodwin of 2024, preaching the superiority of Hungary in openly anti-migrant terms, compare him to the Goodwin of the mid-2010s, when he was an adviser to the coalition government on tackling anti-Muslim hatred, and say, “wow, this guy’s been on a journey”. What were the waypoints of his slide from “just asking the questions”, through dog-whistle racism, to brazen ethno-nationalism? What could have been the trigger events? Which bad crowd has he fallen in with?
The author James Bloodworth, who mapped Goodwin’s journey rigorously la
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