The Pratfall in the Big Hall

On the Aaronovitch vs. Goodwin 'elite' debate: Professional wrestling for the preternaturally boring.

Previously: Marx and no-marks.
On the Daily Telegraph's 140-year beef with Karl Marx and why its columnists insist on getting Marxism wrong. (Yes, this edition has real broad appeal!)

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Last week, a bout for the Super Wankerweight title took place in London. It was neither a ‘Thrilla in Manilla’ nor a ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ but the ‘Pratfall in the Big Hall’ as former Times columnist David Aaronovitch squared up to occasional Sun columnist and book-chomping, wokery-obsessed activist academic Matthew Goodwin for a debate hosted by the policy wonkers at Prospect magazine.

As the sort of accidental John the Baptist of debating Goodwin about his tedious book — I took him on in an encounter hosted by Politics Joe back in April — I was obviously interested to see how Aaronovitch, of whom I also no big fan, got on.

It was exactly what I expected: Professional wrestling.

Actually, that’s unfair on professional wrestling. Wrestlers are athletes who perform incredible feats with scripted conclusions. You can also watch an entire evening of wrestling matches for much less than £25 at most local promotions. For £25 a ticket, Aaronovitch and Goodwin ground out old arguments in the pursuit of cheap heat.

The debate — now available as a podcast episode — was on the proposition ‘Is Britain run by a new out-of-touch elite?’. Of course, there’s nothing elite about a veteran columnist and a professor who’s rarely out of TV studios facing off at an event hosted by a magazine edited by the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, who co-hosts a podcast about the media with a former editor of The Financial Times, himself is now a co-owner of The New European.

The first bit of news to come from the debate had nothing to do with the arguments and everything to do with Goodwin’s eggshell ego and the patrician airs of Prospect editor Alan Rusbridger. The professor fired off the first salvo of the exchange, posting on X (the social network formerly known as Twitter):

One of the more amusing aspects of last night’s debate [with] David Aaronovitch and Alan Rusbridger is they all went for dinner afterwards and didn’t even bother to invite me, despite me giving up my time for free to help make Prospect magazine money! Classic New Elite. 

Aaronvitch replied:

The email you just sent about it didn’t sound amused. And it is paradoxical because my friend Simon who approached you for a chat after the event said you told him you had no time as you had to dash off to dinner. Anyway, I’m genuinely sorry you were offended.

When the enormously edifying spat reached the pages of the Evening Standard, there was space for a high-handed rejoinder for Rushbridger:

Matthew’s obviously used to speaking a posher events where they throw dinners. David and I had a plate of pasta round the corner at the end, together with some of the Prospect team involved in the event. It’s called ‘supper with a friend’, I think. 

There are those professional wrestling vibes again; both sides cutting promos about their rivals with sassy punchlines and personal enmity. Listen to the podcast though and you’ll find that it doesn’t take long for Goodwin and Aaronovitch to find areas of agreement: Both buy into the notion of ‘cancel culture’ and the belief that if anyone is to blame it’s the left.

Suffer through 42 minutes of Goodwin’s sloganeering and Aaronovitch’s smuggery and you’ll reach this section:

Jo Coburn [BBC presenter and moderator for the evening]: 
Can we talk about academia briefly… Matthew’s claim that this elite graduate class is [sic] drifting leftwards on culture over the last 20 years and refers to Tony Blair who expanded and had an ambition to expand higher education dramatically, has left him feeling that freedom of speech is not functioning properly in our academic institutions — and I think there’s a lot of evidence to show that; cancel culture, people not being allowed to say things that perhaps don’t chime with a younger and, I mean, no surprise, more, perhaps left-wing members of universities — would you accept that that has made it more difficult for people in academia to express the sort of views that Matthew has?    

Aaronovitch: Definitely. When I debated Matthew five years ago, I got into a lot of trouble with some people because I was actually doing the debate at all, and there was a round-robin letter which had a number of academics, amongst others, who signed it saying I shouldn’t do it, it shouldn’t happen. 

I mean, it was a provocatively titled debate, and I do think that the commitment to free speech is a problem, not just in British universities, by the way. I have to say, quite a lot of the calls that have come forward from what I would call the New Right for effectively making funding for universities dependent on what courses they teach etc., strike me as very much like Ron DeSantis…  so, it’s not just a left-wing thing…. 

… If we talk about something like the way in which Kathleen Stock was treated at Sussex University; it was an absolute disgrace. At that point in time, the university authorities showed a degree of cowardice — and this is part of the problem; this is a problem that we have: Institutions that are by no means convinced of the arguments — and publishers are similar — do give way to the claims of activists who [say they] represent many more people than they actually represent. In that way, I do agree with [Goodwin] but that does not construct an idea of a new social elite which is actually bound on an effective iteration of the [Great] Replacement Theory. 

That “provocatively titled debate” in 2018 — which featured Eric Kaufmann, Clare Fox, and Trevor Phillips along with Aaronovitch and Goodwin, and was sponsored by the cow site UnHerd and the Academy of Ideas, a Spiked-adjacent contrarian talking shop that was founded and is led by Fox — was first promoted as asking the question: “Is rising ethnic diversity a threat to the West?” The title was later changed to “Immigration and Diversity Politics: A Challenge to Liberal Democracy?” which was just a pseudo-polite gussying up of the original sentiment.

The open letter from a long list of academics and activists that Aaronovitch is still clearly furious about is worth reading in the context of the latest debate. The group wrote in 2018:

… we do not need to be convinced as to the importance of public debate. However, this debate was framed within the terms of white supremacist discourse. Far from being courageous or representative of the views of a ‘silent majority’, this is a reactionary, opportunistic, and intentionally provocative approach, with no concern for the public implications and effect of this framing. 

By presupposing an ethnically homogenous ‘west’ in which ethnic diversity, immigration, and multiculturalism are a ‘problem’ to be fixed, it automatically targets communities already suffering from discrimination as part of the problem. 

The premise of Prospect’s debate accepts that Goodwin has even made an argument worth countering. After filming the Politics Joe video, I was frustrated because I got annoyed during the debate but then I realised that’s because I meant what I was saying and I think Goodwin, who was once a fairly common-or-garden liberal, has found a grift that works for him and is working that to its limits.

In his Substack reflection/self-justification following the debate, Goodwin addresses the question of why (or if) he’s changed:

“What happened to you, Matt?” When did you change your views? When did you become right-wing? What happened?

These are questions I'm asked a lot, mostly by people who work in the universities, the think-tanks, the BBC, the creative industries, who identify on the liberal left.

They’re also questions which came up last week during my debate with former Times columnist David Aaronovitch, at Conway Hall, which was sponsored by the liberal left Prospect Magazine and attended by many of its liberal left readers.

And they’re questions which need answering —especially when you’re in the public square and feel a strong sense of responsibility to your readers, as I do.

There’s no doubt something has changed.

A decade or so ago, I was a fully paid-up member of the liberal left —reading and writing for The Guardian, working for left-wing think-tanks, advising Labour MPs, speaking almost exclusively at left-wing events and conferences, socialising with left-wing academics, even having lunch with one David Aaronovitch.

But today I find myself in a very different space. Most of my friends are now on the right, not the left. Most of the writers I find interesting are on the right, not the left. And most of the arguments I find intellectually stimulating and coherent are in the same place.

So, what happened? Well, as Andrew Sullivan once remarked when he was asked the same question by the liberal left in America, people are asking the wrong question.

The question is not ‘What happened to me?’ No. The real question we should all be asking the liberal left today is— What the hell happened to you?

That’s a long quote but it’s hard to quote Goodwin concisely; the man is painfully prolix in prose and verbose in person; if you don’t interrupt him during a debate, you run the risk of him gish galloping all over the shop. That said, I think the paragraphs above and, in fact, Goodwin’s book can be summed up by the following GIF:

It’s a mentality that, for all their superficial disagreements, Goodwin and Aaronovitch share — the adamantine self-confidence of the columnist.

About 49 minutes into the debate, there’s what appears to be the biggest clash with Aaronovitch going for Goodwin following a monologue about his former employer:

One of the things that I was aware of in my latter days at The Times was although it might be difficult getting a column on a particular topic through the editors — not because they wanted to politically, necessarily, censor it [mumbles] just certain kind of ‘Maybe steer off politics, David…’ — but if you were to suggest something from out of the culture wars, you could always get it on the page. Always, always, always. 

There are some people who’ve now — some very good people — been employed by The Times and Sunday Times now, who don’t yet know that’s all they’re going to be allowed to write about because it sells. You can have a view, a really strong view on a culture war issue, where you cannot rise to having a view on a major economic issue because it’s too complex, so people default off to it all the time. 

We have grown up in this country — on both sides of this divide — a group of what you might call ‘culture wars entrepreneurs’, who I think Matthew is one, and there are others, who are making considerable amounts of personal success out of the business of effectively monetising the culture wars. There are people who do nothing else but do this…

Goodwin is a culture war entrepreneur — he takes his travelling show to any event or conference, no matter how insalubrious — but so is Aaronovitch. He’s simply an older and less nimble version; an opinion-huckster whose ossuary full of bad opinions features his full-throated support for actual wars.

Before The Times, under hard-right ex-Sun, Daily Mail, and Telegraph editorial hardman Tony Gallagher, decided Aaronovitch had outlived his usefulness, he was happy to be employed by Rupert Murdoch — less culture war entrepreneur and more culture war robber baron — for 18 years.

It’s a cheap trick for him to root around in the hall cupboard and discover his conscience now — dusty and unused — then crank it back into life, filling the room with smoke and high dudgeon. When Aaronovitch picked Goodwin up on his selective quotations and sneaky elisions during the debate, it was with the narrowed eye of an old wrestler recognising familiar moves.

After Goodwin accused the BBC of not focusing of “diversity of thought” and Coburn claimed it does, Aaronovitch exploded:

You obviously do which is why you have all these bloody headbangers on, from both sides; you have [Goodwin] on and you have Ash Sarkar on etc. Normal, sensible people can’t get a look in.

Aaronovitch is the ur-centrist; he believes that any opinion that emerges from him is sensible because he is one of the sensibles and that is just logical. Goodwin is a ball of anger, bitterness, and spite, but Aaronovitch is not much different. He too snarls when he is interrupted and accepts the same framing on ‘cancel culture’ as Coburn and Goodwin.

For Aaronovitch, the real problem with Goodwin isn’t how right-wing he is or how much spite he has toward immigrants and young people; it’s that his way of presenting these ideas is insufficiently polite. If Goodwin tied them up in faux-civilised posturing like Matthew Parris or schoolmarmish froideur like Melanie Phillips, Aaronovitch would be happy to chuckle with him at the Christmas Party.

While Goodwin probably lost this match — on points in front of a hostile crowd — there’s every chance Aaronovitch will give him another go and drop the title next time. After all, there’s so much competition for the Super Wankerweight crown.

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