Matthew Goodwin, Reform’s by-election candidate in Gorton and Denton, raised eyebrows when he showed off his man-of-the-people credentials to the Sunday Times by saying he’d “rather shoot myself in the head” than be at a dinner party with Nick Robinson or Mary Beard – and that he’d hate to be a professor in an Oxford college, “a backwater having zero influence over anything”.
Leaving aside Goodwin’s bizarre sideswipe at the almost universally beloved Mary Beard, his former colleagues in academia were surprised to hear of his apparent indifference to status. After all, they recalled, hadn’t Goodwin got into a very public spat with The New World’s own Alan Rusbridger for allegedly not inviting him to dinner after hosting him for a public debate?
And hadn’t he spent most of the last decade applying for politics professorships at universities seen as more prestigious than his own – possibly becoming embittered as he was passed over for the role?
One colleague in particular remembered that Goodwin was once incredibly fond of the idea of attending dinner parties with the liberal elite. After a 2014 workshop at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, Goodwin decamped to the cosy Jude the Obscure pub with a couple of academics, keen to push an idea. The group, he suggested, should start organising a regular series of dinner parties to address the issues being faced by the left.
His first two suggested guests? Not quite Nick Robinson and Mary Beard, but journalists Mehdi Hasan and Owen Jones.
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