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Senior Reform UK figures have defended Nigel Farage’s decision to select the divisive former academic Matthew Goodwin as his candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election, after a loss to the Greens threatened to puncture the populist party’s momentum.
One senior figure defended Goodwin’s selection, saying “we wanted to galvanise the working class vote and we got that, so it was reasonable to run a right-wing candidate”.
“We came second, not third, which was a definite win. It will also focus minds that the next election may be Reform vs the Greens — that’s very helpful.”
Debate has raged over whether Goodwin was a wise choice in the Manchester seat where more than 30 per cent of the population is Muslim. His previous comments on race, integration and Islam — including arguing that citizenship alone is not sufficient to make an individual British — have been weaponised by his opponents. He argues the comments were taken out of context.
Farage and other senior party figures on Friday sought to play down the significance of Goodwin’s failure to win the seat, while also undermining the integrity of the result after concerns were raised about ‘family voting’, where people confer on what is legally supposed to be a secret ballot.
Farage claimed the by-election was a “victory for sectarian voting and cheating”.
“Matt Goodwin was a great candidate for us. Roll on the [local] elections on May 7th. It will be goodbye Starmer and goodbye to the Tory party.”
Reform increased its vote share in the seat from 14 per cent in 2024 to 29 per cent, suggesting that the party’s poll lead does translate into actual votes.
With the Tory share of the vote falling to just 2 per cent from 8 per cent, Reform has also demonstrated it is successfully consolidating the right-wing vote, particularly in the north. The Tories are “essentially now a southern regional party”, the senior Reform insider said.
One significant Reform donor also defended Goodwin saying that “all politicians need to cater to their voter base, and actually all candidates are divisive”. “The Green Party is very divisive too,” they added.
Veteran elections analyst Sir John Curtice said he believed very little of substance could be gleaned from the Gorton and Denton by-election about Reform’s wider electoral prospects, particularly as the seat ranked 440th on a list of the party’s target seats.
“Surprise, surprise, Reform don’t do well among ethnic minority voters,” he said.
However, the somewhat disappointing result comes at a time when Farage’s popularity has begun to dip, with recent polls suggesting around 64 per cent of the public view him unfavourably, up from 59 per cent in June last year.
Reform is now polling at 26 per cent, according to Politico’s poll of polls, its lowest level since April last year, while Labour and the Tories are on 18 per cent and the Greens on 16 per cent.
Luke Tryl, from the More in Common think-tank, said that he believed the “most ominous thing for Reform” was the relatively high turnout in Gorton and Denton. Forty-seven per cent of the population turned out to vote, only fractionally down on the 2024 general election.
“It shows that it’s not just that people voted tactically to keep out Reform but people went out to vote just to keep Reform out,” he said.
“Brits are naturally risk-averse, we’re not dice-rolling people,” Tryl said, adding that Reform would likely have to work harder to win over waverers going forward.
“They selected such a polarising candidate who had a long track record of comments that people found incendiary,” he said, adding that “it could have even deterred Reform-sympathetic voters”.
The fact that Farage’s party was unable to win in a seat where the progressive vote was substantially divided also suggests it may struggle in seats on its target list if left-leaning parties and voters work together to keep him out of power.
Still, Reform figures were adamant that the result in Gorton and Denton was a success for the party. “I think the vote was a huge win,” said one donor. “If the same swing plays out in the next general election, Reform will win by a huge margin.”