“Don’t let mad Zack hypnotise you into voting Green,” Reform by-election candidate Matt Goodwin shouts into a microphone in a sing-song voice, atop a double-decker bus. “They wanna legalise all drugs, crack cocaine and heroin. They want open border chaos. Keir Starmer looks like a robot. Doesn’t understand the British people. Vote Reform.”
Goodwin looks somewhat uncomfortable as he chants, perhaps because there is very obviously no-one around to listen to him. The clip has been posted by Goodwin to social media, but one thing is conspicuously missing from the background – people.
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The constituency has a population of around 114,000, and no shortage of busy streets, but for some reason Goodwin and the Reform battle bus isn’t, in the footage at least, anywhere near any of them. Instead, the bus is passing through a motorway underpass at the edge of the constituency and onto the industrial estate that houses Reform’s campaign HQ, on a road that contains very little housing.
The bus incident wasn’t the only extremely online incident for Goodwin this week, after he posted a picture of himself outside a house plastered in “Vote Matt Goodwin” posters – which were very obviously AI generated, once you looked for more than the briefest of moments. Could he really not find a real poster to pose by?
Reform clearly have the money to fight this by-election: they’ve been paying printers to distribute leaflets, they have a huge warehouse HQ, and even a double-decker Reform battle bus. But is their campaign happening more on the internet than in person?
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