Matthew Goodwin, the saturnine man
My Prospect profile of Matt Goodwin is free to read until Monday
Last year I wrote a profile of Reform UK’s latest parliamentary candidate Matthew Goodwin for Prospect magazine. It’s free to read on the Prospect website until Monday.
What prompted a promising academic to throw it all away to become a propagandist for the radical right?
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.
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.
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.”
You can read the full piece here. You can also read my profiles of Douglas Murray and the ‘reactionary feminists’ for free too.
I once was banned by him on Twitter because I mentioned he should get over himself and lose the chip on his shoulder for not getting into Oxbridge like I did. I now realise after reading your profile the comment probably caused him more consternation than I could imagine at the time.