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Matthew Goodwin, Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection, has built a lucrative career advising investment banks, wealth managers and multinational consultancies on political risk – while positioning himself as a populist champion of ordinary British people against a “new ruling class”.
A Byline Times analysis of Goodwin’s own pronouncements and corporate event listings reveals a pattern of paid speaking engagements for some of the world’s largest financial institutions. The engagements directly contradict the anti-elite message at the heart of his political project – and raise questions about whose interests his brand of populism actually serves.
Goodwin’s speaker agency, the Blair Partnership, list him as having worked with “hundreds of companies”. His personal website and agency profile confirm engagements with JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Rothschild & Cie, Schroders, the “Magic Circle” law firm Clifford Chance, White & Case, and Google.
He has also served as director of the Centre for UK Prosperity at the Legatum Institute – a think tank funded by the Legatum Group, a Dubai-based private investment firm founded by the New Zealand-born billionaire Christopher Chandler – and has spoken at the Trilateral Commission, the elite policy forum founded by David Rockefeller in 1973 and widely regarded by populists as a steering committee of the liberal international order.
Goodwin’s public brand, by contrast, rests on the claim that British politics has been captured by what he calls a “new ruling class”. In his 2023 book Values, Voice and Virtue, he argued that a university-educated liberal elite dominates British political life and excludes ordinary people.
“Britain has always had an out-of-touch elite, of course,” he wrote on his Substack newsletter that year, but “the axis of power is now rapidly tilting toward a new ruling class”.
Together with Professor Roger Eatwell, Goodwin has defined national populism, a political project with which he identifies, as a movement “which prioritises the culture and interests of the nation and promise[s] to give voice to a people who feel they have been held in contempt by distant and often corrupt elites”. His definition of “elite” focuses on cultural progressives in universities, the civil service and the media – but does not extend to the investment bankers, asset managers and global real estate executives who pay for his analysis.
A Reform spokesperson told Byline Times that Goodwin “uses these talks to explain to elites just out of touch they are and why they are so disconnected from the wants and needs of hard-working people.”
The Corporate Speaking Circuit
However, Goodwin’s list of engagements tells a different story. In 2024, he spoke at the Schroders Manchester Investment Conference and at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh for the same firm. Schroders is a global asset management company responsible for around £823 billion in assets under management. Goodwin described the Edinburgh audience as “financial investors and analysts”.
