For the intense GB News host, traveling around the constituency with a security detail, this is a “four-week by-election campaign to bring down Keir Starmer.”
“If we win here, Keir Starmer will almost certainly have to resign,” Goodwin claims. “It will be too embarrassing. It will be unbearable for No.10, especially after the Andy Burnham saga, there’s a whole wing of the Labour Party waiting to pounce on Starmer.”
Reform wants to cast this local race as a referendum on Starmer himself — and not the Labour Party that’s held this area with only one exception since 1906.
Beset with problems in Westminster, the prime minister seems only to be gifting Reform’s candidate a way out of what might ordinarily be a bigger controversy. Goodwin has been endorsed by far-right British activist Tommy Robinson, who Farage has long sought to keep far away from the movements he’s built.
Goodwin repeatedly declined to denounce the endorsement, instead saying: “Father Christmas could come out tomorrow and endorse me, and I’d still just shrug my shoulders, because it’s Gorton and Denton that is going to decide the by-election.”
Pressed again, Goodwin has a get out. Labour, he agues, are a “holier-than-holy party” that wants to weaponize the endorsement from Robinson — but isn’t getting its own house in order. The Reform hopeful brings up Mandelson’s links to Epstein, as well as the fresh allegations — now subject of a police investigation — that the former Labour heavyweight shared market-sensitive government information with the disgraced financier.