“Muhammad being the most popular boys [sic] name in the UK will not surprise those who have read where the UK is heading in the next 74 years if we do not change course,” wrote academic turned hard right rabble-rouser Matt Goodwin on X last week, linking to his AI-written book, Suicide of a Nation.
Perhaps wisely the failed by-election candidate blocked followers from replying to his post, meaning nobody could point out one fairly prominent Muhammad in public life – one Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf, the Reform politician who as well as dubbing himself “shadow home secretary” despite not being an MP also chooses to go by the shortened name Zia Yusuf.
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It’s not even the first time this month Goodwin has managed to alienate a senior Reform colleague. Rats in a Sack reported how the GB News host was fuming about how a former Somali refugee, Yassin Mohamud, had been appointed Lord Mayor of Bristol, writing on X: “This is the state of Britain in 2026. We should NOT have former refugees running our cities.” (Despite being a former professor of politics at the University of Kent, Goodwin was apparently unaware that Lord Mayor is an entirely ceremonial role.)
That came despite the fact that his Reform colleague Nadhim Zahawi, who defected to the party earlier this year, was an Iraqi refugee who fled to the UK when he was nine years old, going on to serve three teams as a Conservative councillor in Putney before becoming MP for Stratford-on-Avon, a junior minister, education secretary and eventually, if briefly, chancellor.
Having fallen out with his colleagues in academia and apparently unpopular with his fellow GB News hosts, is the charmless Goodwin now on a mission to alienate all his Reform chums, one by one?
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