Slobbery and Sycophancy: the case of Matt Goodwin

Heads Goodwins, tails you lose

I first came across the professor of politics at Kent University in 2018, when Matt Goodwin compiled a list of journalists guilty of disparaging the millions who voted to leave the EU in 2016. I had, apparently, greeted their democratic choice by saying that it was as if the “sewers have burst”.

Odd, I thought, I don’t remember denigrating Brexit voters in those terms. I Googled myself and discovered the sly professor had pulled a move ideally suited to the propaganda needs of a conservative elite that poses as the people’s dearest friend.

In June 2016,  I described how Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings had begun their Brexit campaign with a solemn promise that they would never play the race card. We do “not need to focus on immigration,” Cummings said. The essential task for his respectable leave campaign was not to incite fears of foreigners, but “to neutralise the fear that leaving may be bad for jobs and living standards.”

His high-mindedness didn’t last. As referendum day approached, Gove, Johnson and Cummings decided to pull whatever trick they could to get over the line. The race card was a winning card, they decided. They switched to issuing the fake news that 76 million (mainly Muslim)  Turks could head our way if we didn’t leave.   

Looking at their breach of promise and incitement of fear, I said “it is as if the sewers have burst.”

I told Goodwin on Twitter that he was confusing my criticism of the powerful with criticism of the powerless. He ignored me. I realised then that the professor did not abide by the normal academic standards of accuracy but was, when it came down to it, a bit of a slob. And not just any old slob but a sycophantic slob, who slobbered all over the powerful. 

Any student of politics, let alone an actual professor of politics, ought to be able to see through the trick he pulls. Democracy depends on holding the powerful to account so that an informed electorate can judge them. But in the professor’s formulation, criticising Boris Johnson and Michael Gove meant criticising the people who voted for them. Performing your democratic duty became anti-democratic; holding the elite to account became elitist.

By this logic, complaints about a corporation become complaints about its customers, and complaints about a newspaper baron become complaints about its readers. Indeed, you can practice the Goodwin manoeuvre on any prominent person or institution. Criticism of Keir Starmer must surely be an attack on the millions who vote Labour. Attacks on James O’Brien can only reveal elite disdain for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary folk who make up his talk-show audience. As for condemning BBC managers… Take that silver spoon out of your pouting mouth, posh boy. Nothing better reveals the snobbish contempt of ivory tower elitists than that moment when they look down their dainty noses at the plebs who find simple pleasure in watching the Antiques Roadshow.

Oh, hold on a minute. You can’t say that. In an unfact-checked piece for the Sunday Times,  Goodwin lambasts Starmer, O’Brien, and BBC managers as leaders of a new elite that in terms of attitude and background often live “in a galaxy of its own.” He takes drive-by shots at Stephen Bush and Afua Hirsch, who are among the handful of national newspaper columnists from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Their prominence, such as it is, shows that while the new elite “lecture us endlessly about diversity, when it comes to the class, education and values of people who work in them, they are really not diverse at all.” I don’t know about Hirsch’s background, but Bush was raised by a single mother in a tower block, and makes an unlikely woke aristo.

Goodwin condemns me, again, and tells the Sunday Times that along with Laurie Penny and Matthew d'Ancona, I described “leavers as thickos, racists, bigots or far-right extremists.” Would we “tolerate this kind of prejudice were it directed towards any other group in society” he demanded.

I had, as I have already mentioned, criticised a breach of promise by Johnson (a cabinet minister and future prime minister), Cummings (who would be his chief of staff) and Gove (another cabinet minister). Free societies must “tolerate this kind of prejudice” against the powerful if they wish to stay free.

I hope you can now see how the Goodwin manoeuvre works.