Awkward times at Reform, where Isabel Oakeshott, “journalist”, party cheerleader and partner of deputy leader Richard Tice, seemed to repost an attack on Gorton and Denton by-election candidate Matthew Goodwin at the weekend.
Laurence Fox, the former actor turned hard right activist and sometime leader of the Reclaim Party, reposted on X a message from Goodwin in which the Reform candidate wrote: “The establishment are throwing everything at me. But I’m here. Canvassing” (curiously, the accompanying photograph showed Goodwin not so much canvassing as standing alone in an empty street). Fox wrote in response: “You are the establishment, Matt. Just in different colours.”
Fox’s post was then reposted by Oakeshott herself – odd not just because the Dubai-based hacktivist is backing Reform’s campaign, but because her and Goodwin are said to be old friends, with the former academic liking to talk of his closeness to her.
Fortunately, it was all an error! Oakeshott quickly reposted Goodwin’s original post, adding: “This is the one I meant to Retweet! @GoodwinMJ has given this campaign everything he’s got while the Establishment has thrown all it can at him. He will make a brilliant @reformparty_uk MP.”
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“LOLLLLLL! You and Richard CANNOT STAND THIS MAN. This is pathetic backtracking,” wrote Dan Wootton, the former GB News presenter and pal of Fox’s.
It is the latest in what has been a hapless campaign for Goodwin, who was introduced by Nigel Farage as “coming home to Manchester” despite being born and bred in Hertfordshire. The party very quickly faced a police investigation after sending out what appeared to be handwritten letters from a “concerned neighbour” that failed to state they had been written and distributed by Reform itself.
Goodwin then pulled out of a hustings event at 30 minutes’ notice, claiming to be concerned about the impartiality of its organiser, and bagged himself a celebrity endorsement in Tommy Robinson, the far right football hooligan and criminal.
And this weekend he tried to get things back on track with a soft-soap interview in the Telegraph in which he claimed to have had a swastika put on his door while working at Kent University for holding right wing views – something the very online Goodwin curiously appears not to have photographed nor indeed ever mentioned before.
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