Failed Reform candidate Goodwin tries to defend ‘his’ AI-driven book

Matt Goodwin hasn’t had a great past month. In February 2026, Goodwin was trounced in the Gorton and Denton by-election by the Greens’ Hannah Spencer. Less than four weeks later, he’s now trying to defend ‘his’ awful, Islamophobic new book after parts – perhaps much – of it were found to be derived from AI chatbots.

Not only that, but his editing was so sloppy that he even left tell-tale ChatGPT indicators in links he puts in the book. What’s more, he can’t blame anyone else for the sloppiness – because he’d already boasted about having “no major publisher”, supposedly because “they would have censored me”.

Goodwin exposed

The exposure of Goodwin’s AI-dodge came in a thread from observant writer and X user Andy Twelves. Twelves found a host of false claims that he described as “AI hallucinations”. Below are a few extracts from the thread:

Claim 1: “In one year 1 classroom in Bradford, only four of twenty eight pupils spoke English as their first language. Teachers report spending large amounts of time simply mediating between dozens of languages, making normal teaching almost impossible and slowing down the rate…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

Some of the errors were schoolboy stuff – if an AI chatbot were a schoolboy. Like a made-up claim about languages spoken in a school – that attributes the claim to a non-existent BBC service:

Claim 2.1: “Teachers often feel they are no longer running a school but a translation service. One inspection report put it bluntly: ‘Many pupils join the school with extremely limited English. This significantly slows the pace of learning.’ This is not multicultural harmony or…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

Goodwin wouldn’t be Goodwin if he didn’t throw in a bit of gratuitous reference to classics and academics. In this case, gratuitous also means non-existent:

Claim 8: “The academic James Burnham put it bluntly many years ago: ‘Power is exercised through organisations those who control the organisations control the instruments of power’”

Reality: Burnham said things vaguely like this, but I cannot find this quote. I believe this is…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

And – of course – some trans-bashing, apparently based on equally made-up sources:

Claim 10: “‘The most dangerous experiments’ warned the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek, ‘are those conducted on entire societies.’”⁰⁰Reality: I cannot verify this quote, or anything similar to it from Hayek or any other philosopher or economist. I believe this is…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

And some equally ill-founded migrant-bashing:

Claim 13: “‘The essence of a nation’, wrote the academic Walker Connor, ‘is not the territory occupied but the people who occupy it. To replace the people is to replace the nation.’”⁰⁰Reality: I cannot verify this quote, or anything similar to it from Walker Connor or anyone…

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

And, of course, we shouldn’t omit the AI-slop indicators:

(h/t @johnpmerrick) bossman @GoodwinMJ left the ChatGPT in the url in his references hahaha pic.twitter.com/QnL2Cgujfz

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

Even more embarrassing for Goodwin, Twelves said he had only done the first five chapters so far:

.@GoodwinMJ can you please outline the above, this is only in the first 5 chapters of the book – I’ve got the Carabao Cup to go to this afternoon, so await your response before reading on.

— andy twelves (@andytwelves) March 22, 2026

FAFO

In a long X rant about horrid left-wingers, Goodwin wrote that he sees “no issue obtaining datasets via AI so long as they are cross-checked with the original source.” Well, maybe – but it seems they weren’t ‘cross-checked’, were they?

This is not Goodwin’s first brush with, well, making stuff up. He was clinically dismantled by journalist Mehdi Hasan in 2024 for making completely false claims that more than tripled the number of immigrants in London housing and could only lamely respond that he’d need to look it up. Hasan saved him the trouble. The clip is well worth a watch:

Featured image via the Canary