Matt Goodwin’s Divine Right of the Spads

While some readers may feel that Matt Goodwin has already received enough of a kicking this week, across the media both mainstream and social, the truth is that he has not been kicked enough. In this article, I want to focus on a single claim he made in his disastrous (and now infamous) appearance on Peter McCormack’s show, which should be career-ending. Goodwin pretends to be a fearless tribune of elite realignment, even today in a slop AI-ridden post, he declares: ‘Westminster doesn’t want you to know the truth’. But with McCormack, the mask came off fully. It revealed a subversive wrecker peddling the most threadbare defence of a system he claims to despise. He said, without a shred of self-awareness, that political parties must remain the near-exclusive domain of experienced MPs, political wonks, SPADs, and career operatives – an unofficial managerial aristocracy – that must gatekeep out the plebs lest ‘complete chaos’ will reign. To steelman Goodwin, he did not say that the party should only consist of experienced MPs and wonks, but rather that the new in-take must be shepherded along by those who know better. Without this indispensable experience, the downright dirty and reeking ranks of peasants, mud-faced like actual Baldrick, would be rudderless: they need his careful guiding managerial hand.

A picture of the great unwashed just waiting for Goodwin to tell them what to do.

Goodwin’s sole defence for this ludicrous stance was the failure of Poujadism. The Union de défense des commerçants et artisans was a petit-bourgeois right-populist party during the turbulent and unstable Fourth Republic of France in the mid-1950s, before Charles de Gaulle rendered them irrelevant in 1958 by establishing the Fifth Republic. That’s right folks, because of this small historical detail, we must leave the business of governing to the Tory Boy-faced Oxbridge PPE wankers who brought us The Cameron Delusion and appointed such geniuses as Sajid Javid and Kwasi Kwarteng as the Chancellors of the Exchequer. These anointed few know better than business owners, smelly plumbers, even more smelly farmers, and frankly stinking electricians what needs to be done. Goodwin spoke with the zeal of a medieval guild master guarding his monopoly, and McCormack did very well to remain calm in the face of this dull, self-serving Westminster cant.

Let us be clear about what Goodwin is defending: a revolving-door of functionaries whose entire formation has consisted of drafting briefs, leaking to friendly hacks, and massaging the optics of managed decline. Their ‘experience’ is the knowledge of what is, in effect, an engine of failure. The ‘experience’ he is talking about amounts to knowing which civil servant to brief, which donor to placate, which Fleet Street editor to dine with, and a navigation Parliamentary rules. The notion it is ‘impossible’ for ordinary men and women to do this is nonsensical. Let us consider, for a moment, the entire history of the Labour Party: miners, railwaymen, cotton workers, self-taught autodidacts, union bosses, and so on. Or even the entire history of the Liberal Party: industrial tycoons, self-made men, merchants of every kind, complete ‘outsiders’ to the system like David Lloyd George. Or, dare I even say it, the entire history of the Tory Party: landlords, aristocrats, and even the occasional greengrocer’s daughter! Could it be that me, author of The Populist Delusion, believes in democracy more than Goodwin? Well, no, but the point is that Goodwin’s claim is completely indefensible and myopic. Even within my own lifetime there was Neil Kinnock delivering barnstorming speeches about being the first of his kind to ever go to university or John Major, quite literally, standing on a wooden soapbox. The professionalisation of ‘the political class’, which Goodwin sees as divinely ordained to rule, has only really existed since David Cameron. In the overall scheme of things, it is the anomaly and not the rule. Even Blair’s government had people from a wide variety of unconventional non-professionalised backgrounds like John Prescott, David Blunkett or Alan Johnson. Rupert Lowe’s call to bring in what the elite theorists such as Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto called an ‘aristocracy of the talents’ is not some arcane restoration of the nineteenth-century but simply the overturning of something that has scarcely existed for two decades. Goodwin’s elitism is misplaced, badly informed, and simply blind to how Parliament has functioned in our lifetimes. If Diane Abbott can learn the ropes in the House of Commons, are we to believe that the likes of Connor Tomlinson or Charlie Downes can’t? A ridiculous assertion. Goodwin continually called these young men ‘strident’ and ‘shrill’ but has he ever seen old Mathematics Abbott back in the 1970s?

Lowe’s preference – and mine, and Peter McCormack’s – for government by ‘fit characters’, talented men and women of independent means, and a proven capacity in the world of affairs, is not some radical utopian fantasy, it is in the mainstream of political thought going back to the Federalist papers or even the basic idea of the House of Lords before it was castrated and turned into a retirement home for MPs. The upper chamber was supposed to be stocked with men who possessed a material interest in the realm’s continuity – land, commerce, distinguished service – rather than the fleeting ambitions of careerists like Goodwin. If one turns to the elite theorists, they too had little time for bureaucrats of this stripe. ‘Bureaucratization’, Robert Michels wrote in Political Parties, ‘suppresses individuality and gives to a society in which employees predominate a narrow, petty-bourgeois and philistine stamp. The bureaucratic spirit corrupts character and engenders moral poverty’. This serves as a good description of what Goodwin has now become: artless, mundane, career-seeking, and bereft of bigger ideas or principles. There can be no real change from a party stuffed with people like that.

Lowe spoke more sense in one interview than Goodwin managed in his embarrassing recent AI-assisted book: politics needs men and women who have built things, run businesses, met payrolls, stared down regulators and unions, what Thomas Carlyle called ‘Captains of Industry’. We need people who understand that wealth creation is not an abstract spreadsheet exercise fiddled about within think tanks, but a brutal contest with reality. Somehow, Goodwin disagrees. In many ways, Lowe’s view is simply mainline Thatcherism. The Iron Lady herself recruited people with industrial grit, entrepreneurs and who understood production and risk. One such man was David Young. Thatcher enlisted ‘buy in’ from Jeffrey Sterling (P&O), John King (British Airways), and James Hanson (a corporate raider type). Thatcher lionised tech success stories like Alan Sugar and Clive Sinclair. Norman Tebbit had been an RAF pilot and union bruiser. If Tebbit had been in Reform UK, I can guarantee you Nigel Farage would have fired him already. But if Thatcher had not had a man like Tebbit there kicking the crap out of the wets, and winning the respect of civil servants, she might have got a lot less done. Rupert Lowe is cut exactly from this sort of cloth: someone who has lived in the real world and wants to get things done and who will grab the managerial elite by the scruff of the neck, if necessary, to get it done. This is not a revolutionary or even radical aim, as Goodwin seems to think, it is, if anything, a minor adjustment to undo very recent developments which are an anomaly in the longue durée.