Reform candidate Goodwin accused of sexual harassment

Reform parachuted-in Gorton and Denton candidate Matthew Goodwin has been accused by a female GB News staffer of sexually harassing her. And Reform boss Nigel Farage is thought to have known about the allegation before he named Goodwin as the party’s candidate in the by-election.

Usually, ‘Labour’ PM Keir Starmer tries to mimic Farage, but for a change Farage is mimicking Starmer’s serial blind-eye-turning to appointing sex pests and paedophiles.

The junior TV staffer complained to the channel’s HR department that Goodwin had made inappropriate comments, including on her appearance. The victim of the alleged harassment was deeply disturbed by it, with a colleague saying that:

She was very upset at the time, and her colleagues were upset on her behalf that she was so distressed by the situation.

Reform dismissed the revelations as a “desperate, last-minute smear” by the Guardian. Goodwin is said to have denied the allegations, while his lawyers admitted the complaint was made – but the situation is quite a turnaround.

Reform scrabbling to recover

Goodwin wrote in 2014 about a series of sexual harassment scandals by what was then called UKIP. He called the latest scandals were “another bad week” for Farage – but found it “intriguing” that the string of appalling behaviour by UKIP politicians and candidates wasn’t damaging the party’s popularity. Goodwin said that people were “rightly shocked” by the revelations, but that UKIP voters had decided to give the party “a free pass”:

All of this raises an obvious and intriguing question – why is none of this negative coverage reducing support for Farage and Ukip, which is quickly becoming the Teflon party of British politics? … The latest revelations rightly shocked the progressive and socially liberal, but they are unlikely to feature prominently on the radar of the average Ukip voter….

…They have found Britain’s social and economic transformation profoundly unsettling and are watching the country evolve into a society they simply do not like … unsurprisingly, many of them have decided to give Ukip a free pass: “So what if that Farage has a few friends who are nutters,” they say.

Goodwin went on to note the importance of fighting racism and decry the “rise of radical right politics”:

Calling out racism where racism exists is important. But over the longer term this will not get our society very far. If it did, then Europe as a whole would not have seen a stubbornly persistent rise of radical right politics over a 30-year period.

Now he’s standing as a candidate for a far-right, racist party, has made comments that “young girls and women” should be given a “biological reality” check – and is the subject of a sexual harassment complaint.

If voters didn’t care in 2014, will enough of them care now to reject his – and Starmer’s – politics and scandals in 2026?

Featured image via the Canary