Labour’s Matt Goodwin clip is pure disinformation

Matt Goodwin – political scientist and GB News presenter – has been unveiled as Reform UK’s by-election candidate for the Great Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton. ‘Matt is coming home to Manchester and will win every vote’, tweeted party leader Nigel Farage on Tuesday – a not-so-distant possibility, given Reform’s polling numbers. ‘This is a referendum on Keir Starmer’, Goodwin told his 285,000 followers on X. ‘If you want him out, vote Reform.’

Labour’s response to Reform’s announcement was embarrassing and shameful. Only a couple of hours later, party’s X account posted a clip of Goodwin captioned: ‘In his own words…’ The footage shows Goodwin addressing a crowd at a conference, smirking as he says: ‘I was lucky enough, or unfortunate enough, to be in Manchester a few days ago… The energy in this room is 10 times what it was in Manchester, so congratulations.’ The statement is met with applause. 

Labour’s crack comms team overlaid the footage with the following text: ‘This is what Reform’s latest candidate thinks about where he’s standing to represent’ – complete with an embarrassed-face emoji just for good measure. The implication is that Goodwin not-so-secretly thinks Manchester is a bit of a dump. 

But as Goodwin quickly explained, he wasn’t referring to Manchester the city, let alone deriding Mancunians. He was, as he himself put it, ‘referring to the dying Tory Party conference that was held in Manchester [in 2025]’. ‘This is exactly what the British people are sick and tired of. Labour gaslighting and misleading them at every turn.’

Goodwin is right – the clip was pure disinformation. Perhaps the Labour intern who edited it is angling for a job with the BBC’s Panorama. 

Others on social media were also quick to smell a rat. ‘You lying cowards’, said one commenter of Labour’s tactics. It shows ‘how low the [the party] will stoop’, he continued. 

This kind of stunt shows that Labour is getting desperate in the face of an insurgent Reform. The underhand tricks it has been relying on for years – the demonisation of opponents and the peddling of untruths and scare stories – have now grown tiresome. No one is falling for this anymore.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.