Matt Goodwin is the Alan Partridge of the far right…
But he’s no less dangerous for that
Steve Coogan in character as Alan Partridge CREDIT: THE BBC
[This is an updated version of a piece I originally sent out yesterday]
In my home city of Manchester, the Alan Partridge of the British far right looks as if he may win the by-election in Gorton and Denton.
If he takes this once safe Labour seat on 26 February, excitable political correspondents predict that Keir Starmer’s premiership could be in crisis again, and the UK could be looking for yet another prime minister.
Honestly, a national emergency because of Matt Goodwin, a silly, status obsessed and pompous little man without any of the menace and charisma of the true demagogue.
The very thought appears ridiculous. Goodwin’s ideas are monstrous, certainly. He has gone beyond the reasonable desire to control migration to encouraging the far-right notion that people of Asian, Afro-Caribbean, Jewish, or Irish heritage can never be English.
The blood-and-soil nationalism of fascist Europe in other words.
Goodwin helped to create a world where Elon Musk backs Rupert Lowe when he declares that “millions must go,” and Katie Lam, from the supposedly respectable Conservative party, demands that legal residents of this country be forced “to go home”.
He’s campaigning in Gorton and Denton with the full support of the thug Tommy Robinson. An investigation by journalists at the Manchester Mill found campaign workers canvassing for him who used the “n” word and declared they would “never touch a Jewish woman”.
But as a man rather than as a mouthpiece for foul ideas Goodwin is too ridiculous to be a monster.
At the BBC hustings on Monday, he appeared to be a stock character from English satire that stretches from Partridge through David Brent, Hyacinth Bucket, Basil Fawlty, Charles Pooter all the way back to Malvolio: the social climber desperate to assert his status.
Goodwin turned on the Green candidate for failing to “value the social mobility” which had taken the young Goodwin from a humble background to become a politics professor at Kent University, no less.
“It’s almost as if you are resentful of people who have built themselves up and become successful,” he sniffed.
“The left used to celebrate people who had built themselves up” but now in our fallen times it cannot just stand back and simply applaud Matt Goodwin’s glittering career.
After he gave up a professorship to become an online extremist, his former colleagues at Kent University described a “brittle” man unable to distinguish between academic disagreement (a normal part of campus life) and personal attacks.
Say what you like about Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, they have a dark charisma. They dominate their parties and change their countries.
Matt Goodwin is what happens next.
Like Stephen Miller, Robert Jenrick, most of the comment page writers for the Tory press, and J. D. Vance, Goodwin is a humourless plodder from the second generation of the radical right.
He’s an everyday extremist, a run-of-the-mill race worrier who rehearses the lines of the new orthodoxy.
Don’t fear him any less for that. It is Goodwin’s very monotony that makes men like him so frightening.
In 1963 Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” as she watched Israelis try the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for the mass murder of Jews. Instead of seeing a monster, she saw a bureaucrat.
“He was not Iago and not Macbeth,” she wrote.
