Matthew Goodwin, Reform UK’s candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, has ties to influential groups in the orbit of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Goodwin, a GB News presenter and former University of Kent professor, is standing for Parliament on 26 February, presenting himself as a champion of ordinary people against “the elites”.

However, despite his rhetoric, Goodwin’s profile has been boosted by a global network of pro-MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) groups, some of which have been backed by fossil fuel money.

Reform, which is leading the polls ahead of UK-wide elections in May, has echoed Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda – campaigning for new fossil fuel extraction and to scrap clean energy targets.

However, Trump is deeply unpopular in the UK – even among Reform voters – and there are growing concerns about his attempts to interfere in European politics.

Goodwin has ties to a number of pro-Trump groups, including the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. think tank behind the radical Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term; the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a conservative network advised by Trump’s senior allies; and the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement, which has close ideological ties to the current U.S. regime.

The Financial Times reported last week that the U.S. State Department plans to bankroll “MAGA” think tanks and charities in the UK and EU which share Trump’s agenda – a plan criticised by campaigners as an effort to “usurp European democracy”.

Goodwin’s party leader Nigel Farage, one of Trump’s closest UK allies, has extensive ties to MAGA groups. Farage has been helping to import the architects of Trump’s agenda into the UK, and has received £150,000 from donors to attend pro-Trump events or cheerlead for his agenda since July 2024. 

“Reform are a lobby shop for polluting industries. They get millions from fossil fuel interests, polluters and climate sceptics, while their by-election candidate is a fixture at think tanks bankrolled by oil and gas,” said Ami McCarthy, head of politics at Greenpeace UK.

“Like their friend Donald Trump, they want to unleash more oil drilling and fracking, undermine climate science and sabotage our cheapest, cleanest energy sources and the thousands of jobs they support. Reform’s plan to scrap net zero won’t take a penny off your energy bills – it’ll just hand your wallet over to the gas giants and markets controlled by dictators like Putin.

“When voters in Gorton and Denton see Farage and Goodwin necking pints down the pub, they’d do well to ask: who’s buying the rounds?”

In his previous career as an academic, Goodwin had been affiliated with a range of mainstream institutions and had often been critical of radical right-wing politics. But, as he has moved into political activism, he has increasingly been a fixture of right-wing groups with ties to fossil fuel interests.

Goodwin joined GB News as a presenter at the start of 2025, having previously been a frequent guest pundit. The loss-making broadcaster – Farage’s principal employer – is co-owned by Paul Marshall, whose hedge fund Marshall Wace had $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) invested in fossil fuel firms, including Chevron, Shell and Equinor, as of June 2023.

Marshall owns GB News alongside the Legatum Group, an investment firm based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), an autocratic petrostate that derives its wealth from oil and gas.

Goodwin has criticised what he calls “the fanatical obsession with net zero”, which he blames for high energy prices. In reality, high wholesale gas prices are largely responsible for the billions in extra spending borne by the government and households since Russia’s 2021 invasion of Ukraine.

Between the 2019 and 2024 general elections, Reform received 92 percent of its funding from fossil fuel investors, climate science deniers, and major polluters.

Carys Boughton, campaign co-ordinator at Fossil Free Parliament, said: “Reform presents itself as the party for ordinary, working people, but look just a bit closer and it becomes shockingly clear that they really represent the interests of the one percent: the individuals, organisations and companies that are exploiting people and planet for their personal gain.

“Should Matthew Goodwin win this by-election, he’ll become another mouthpiece in Parliament for the fossil fuel industry and other mega-polluters, all the while scapegoating the most vulnerable in our society to distract from the ultra rich asset-stripping our collective resources.”

Reform and Goodwin were approached for comment.

MAGA Ties

Despite his avowed nationalism, Goodwin has ties to a range of pro-Trump groups attempting to influence politics across the world.

In 2023 and 2025, he spoke at conferences organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a radical right-wing network run and funded by Marshall and the Legatum Group.

Fronted by Canadian activist Jordan Peterson, speakers at ARC events have included Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (who’s also on the ARC advisory board), as well as Republican donor and Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Last year’s ARC event in London was attended by a number of oil and gas executives, as well as far-right politicians from across Europe.

Goodwin has also been feted by the architects of Trump’s authoritarian second term agenda.

In July 2024, he gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, a document which urged Trump to “dismantle the administrative state”, reverse policies on climate action, slash restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrap state investment in renewable energy, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency.

It also proposed limiting reproductive rights, including further limiting access to abortions as well as access to contraceptives.

As reported by DeSmog, the Heritage Foundation gathered hardline conservative groups last year to discuss ideas for dismantling the EU. It also attempted to influence Albania’s May 2025 election in favour of the conservative candidate.

In 2024, Goodwin gave a speech about Brexit at a conference in Brussels hosted by National Conservatism (NatCon), another group with ties to the Trump administration.

NatCon is run by U.S. think tank the Edmund Burke Foundation, which received $250,000 in 2024 for its “general operations” from the Heritage Foundation.

The NatCon movement is closely associated with U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who gave a speech to the group’s Washington D.C. conference in July 2024.

The 2024 NatCon Brussels event was attended by Nigel Farage, former Conservative home secretary (and now Reform MP) Suella Braverman, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The event was sponsored by Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a Hungarian think tank funded by Orbán’s government.

Orbán’s Hungary

As well as being associated with MAGA groups, Goodwin has extensive ties to allies of Orbán’s autocratic regime.

He was previously a visiting fellow at MCC, and has spoken at its last two summer festivals. The group is primarily funded via a 10 percent stake in Hungary’s national oil company, MOL, gifted to it by Orbán’s government.

At the 2025 summer event, Goodwin praised the Hungarian government as a “counterexample” to what he called the ideology of “national self-loathing” in Britain. 

In a 2024 interview with Mandiner, a pro-government Hungarian outlet, he insisted that Western critics misunderstand Hungary.

He claimed that it is simply resisting a “liberal agenda” imposed by a “narrow minority” of Western countries. He praised Orbán’s stance on Ukraine, despite the regime’s record of blocking EU military aid and opposing sanctions on Russian oligarchs.

After MCC’s 2024 summer festival, Goodwin tweeted: “I just spent 4 days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the West. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken borders. No self-loathing. No chaos. And now I’ve just landed back in the UK.”

Goodwin has also recently appeared at several other events connected to the Hungarian government – including the Roger Scruton Symposium in October at the Hungarian Embassy in London alongside MCC Brussels executive director Frank Furedi.

He also spoke at the Budapest Global Dialogue in June, co-hosted by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation.

The Hungarian Institute of International Affairs is funded by Orbán’s government and speakers at the event included Viktor Orbán’s political director (and MCC chair) Balázs Orbán, several Hungarian government ministers and advisors, former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, as well as representatives from MCC and the Prosperity Institute, a think tank run by the Legatum Group.

Goodwin was previously a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute (now the Prosperity Institute), where he wrote a briefing paper in March 2024 called Who Votes Reform?, an analysis of the party’s polling. The institute hosted a launch event for Goodwin’s book, Bad Education, in February 2025.

Orbán’s regime has been condemned by international watchdogs for restricting democratic freedoms and persecuting opposition groups.

According to Reporters Without Borders, the Hungarian prime minister has built a “media empire subject to his party’s orders”. Recent constitutional amendments have allowed the government to ban LGBT events, and revoke the citizenship of dual nationals if they are deemed to constitute a threat to “public order, public safety, or national security”.

The government has banned pro-Palestine protests and has tightened abortion rules, making it “harder to access a legal and safe abortion” according to Amnesty International.

In 2018, Hungary passed a law – later ruled to be incompatible with EU law – that made it a crime to help asylum seekers.