Matt Goodwin is running: the search for Reform’s elusive byelection candidate

On a bracingly cold February night in Levenshulme, a black Volkswagen people-carrier draws up outside a little parish church, around which a small crowd has begun to gather. From behind the car’s darkened windows steps the Reform candidate for the Gorton and Denton byelection, dressed in the trademark gilet that makes him look less like a politician and more like a man who has come straight from a grouse shoot. As he enters the church where the electoral hustings will take place, a leaflet is thrust into his hand, which as he will later discover with a horrified grimace, is a flyer for the local branch of the Communist League, bearing policies such as “amnesty for all immigrants” and “defend Cuba’s socialist revolution”.

But then, when you are trying to attract the attention of someone as elusive as Prof Matt Goodwin, you have to seize your opportunities whenever they arise. Over recent weeks the former academic and rightwing firebrand has been a curiously intangible presence in the constituency whose representation he is seeking: perpetually detectable but not remotely approachable, always visible without ever really being seen.

None of the dozens of voters I spoke to across the area over the course of two weeks in February had actually glimpsed him in the flesh, much less seen him on their street or doorstep. “He’s probably chilling in St Albans,” jokes one young man crossing the Stockport Road in Denton, a pointed reference to Goodwin’s southern upbringing and unmistakable home counties vowels.

View image in fullscreen The trademark gilet that makes him look less like a politician and more like a man who has come straight from a grouse shoot: Matt Goodwin. Photograph: Mark Waugh/The Guardian

This is not quite true. By his own account, Goodwin has been out campaigning every single day since his candidacy was announced in late January, although this in itself is a term freighted with am