Is Matt Goodwin's book really the country's biggest-selling paperback?

Matt Goodwin, the former academic turned hard right rabbler-rouser, has been loudly boasting to anyone who will listen that his latest book, the self-published Suicide of a Nation, is currently the country’s biggest-selling.

“Now the No.1 Sunday Times bestseller they really don’t want you to read,” runs the pinned post on his X account, although who “they” are is not made clear.

Earlier this week, as he commenced a European tour, he was boasting: “Tonight, days after reaching No.1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list, I’m in Vienna, Austria. For the first of many major international events on my book Suicide of a Nation. It’s sold out.”

And, on Wednesday, he listed a number of media outlets that he’d like to “debate” his book on, including BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, The Rest is Politics, James O’Brien’s LBC show and Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.

“I am inviting the following to debate a book many, many people in Britain are now reading,” he wrote. “You claim to understand the country. So, let’s debate the most popular paperback among the people.”

Quite why Goodwin is so keen to get into another broadcast debate is unknown, when the last time he did it, on his own GB News channel against the writer, Andy Twelves, who had discovered quite how much of the book had been reliant on AI, the Reform man was so comprehensively bested that even his own colleagues later laughed at him on air.

Suggested Reading

A night out in Budapest with Matt Goodwin

Rats in a Sack

But that’s by the by. A better question is: why is Goodwin continuing to claim Suicide of a Nation is the UK’s best-selling paperback, when it demonstrably isn’t?

It is, admittedly, currently number one in the non-fiction paperback chart – although, like with music singles, that doesn’t currently require too many sales. The most recent figures show Goodwin’s opus selling 4,425 copies in a week, or the average approximate home attendance of League Two football club Newport County.

That, however, wouldn’t make the top 10 of the best-selling fiction paperbacks in the country, currently led by Lee Child and Andrew Child’s Exit Strategy, or indeed the children’s chart, topped by the considerably more intellectually rigorous than Goodwin’s book Fluffy Chick by Rod Campbell (“Follow Chick around the farm and meet all her animal friends”).

Perhaps Goodwin is mistaking his book for fiction? If so, he wouldn’t be alone. Twelves’s research found numerous claims in his tawdry tome which bear little scrutiny and carry no citation. These include that only four of 28 pupils spoke English as their first language in a single year one classroom in Bradford, that most primary school pupils’ main language in Leicester, Luton, Slough and “virtually all of London” is no longer English and that Cicero warned “We must begin with the people closest to us” (there is no record of Cicero ever saying this).

There are also other apparently hallucinated quotes from the academics James Burnham and Walker Connor and the philosophers Friedrich Hayek and Roger Scruton, a quote attributed to Boris Johnson when “in opposition in 2019” (the Conservatives were in power from 2010 to 2024) and apparently invented visa figures, among much else.

Time to move Goodwin’s book to a chart more befitting his oeuvre?