Matt Goodwin is still a sore loser

Matt Goodwin, the former academic who failed to win Gorton and Denton for Reform last week despite the party throwing the kitchen sink at it, is not a sore loser. And, as if to prove it, he’s written yet another lengthy screed about how he’s not a sore loser – it’s just that everyone and everything was to blame for his defeat except him.

The GB News man, who did most of his campaigning online and focused on the single issue of immigration, has attributed his beating to how the left “directly exploited biraderi [a term meaning South Asian Muslims] clan-based networks and communalism to harvest votes”, muttering darkly that: “Every Labour MP in Westminster knows this. Every Labour councillor knows this. Every serious journalist knows this. And so too do the Greens because they are now doing the same.”

Writing on, inevitably, X, Goodwin said: “It is ironic. The Left are the first to trace everything they don’t like in politics (Brexit, Trump, etc.) to electoral interference from ‘Russia’, ‘social media’, ‘Cambridge Analytica’ and more. Yet when electoral interference happens to involve the Left ruthlessly exploiting illiberal and undemocratic practices they are silent or aggressively attack those who point it out.”

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The left was, he wrote, “turning a blind eye to the ugly misogyny and dogmatism that is now taking place in polling stations and entrenching itself in our democracy”, although space, alas, prevented him from expanding on how this explained Muslim voters turning out in their numbers to elect a white woman standing for a party led by a gay Jewish man.

“This is not about being a ‘sore loser’, he added. “It is not really even about Gorton & Denton anymore.”

Poor Matt! Perhaps – just perhaps – it was about a terrible candidate from leafy Hertfordshire, with no knowledge of the constituency or its specific issues, who failed to turn up to a hustings citing bias, with no evidence, spent all his time on social media and thought just being on TV would be enough for him to walk it. But maybe we’ll never know?

Still at least some Reform fans are drawing more positive conclusions from the result. The Telegraph has reported that, were the result to be replicated across the whole of Britain at the next general election, Nigel Farage would be strolling into Downing Street with Labour reduced to 33 seats and the Conservatives just 10. Imagine how big their majority would be if they’d lost even more convincingly!