Lewis Goodall is concerned. The News Agents host has met Independent Muslim campaigners in Birmingham, like the lawyer Akhmed Yakoob, and has found them to be dismissive of journalists, dubious with language about “Zionist puppet masters”, disdainful towards homosexuality, and comically self-important (with Yakoob comparing himself to Nelson Mandela). Goodall was eventually kicked out of the café where he had been interviewing Yakoob and his colleagues.
Mr Yakoob is a rather comical figure — stalking about Birmingham in outfits reminiscent of either The Sopranos or Peaky Blinders while tubthumping about communitarian causes. The bio on his professional website which describes him as a “visionary” and “one of the UK’s leading legal minds” is entertaining. His noisy attachment to causes like that of the men who claimed to have been assaulted by the police at Manchester Airport, when they had actually assaulted the police, has been less amusing.
Yakoob’s independents did not have the roaring success they had hoped for in last week’s local elections. Still, various independents were elected. This should come as no surprise for Critic readers, who will have read Fred Sculthorp on dysfunction in Birmingham and Sam Bidwell on electoral sectarianism. Yet Goodall appears to have been taken aback.
There are deep ironies here. “Birmingham, my home city, is a fantastic city, with fantastic people,” Goodall wrote in 2025, “A success story. It has its problems, like anywhere. But the obsession the online right has with it is as transparent as it gets.”
Let’s be fair — Goodall is perfectly entitled to like his hometown. I don’t doubt that there are fantastic people there. The rise of Ahmed Yakoob, TikTok lawyer and local political activist, is hardly equivalent to the rise of some mighty political strongman.
Still, “it has its problems, like anywhere” was a comically inadequate qualification when it came to a city where strikes left rubbish piled up in the streets as part of the fallout of deranged “equal pay” rulings, where the police misled people to justify banning Israeli football fans amid intercommunal tensions, and where farcical activists like Mr Yakoob can become political kingpins.
Mr Goodall has spent recent years decrying the “obsessive culture wars” of the British right, where “anti-institutionalism” holds that “the established legal, cultural and political order is antithetical to conservative ends”. God only knows why right-wingers have begun to suspect that the Equality Act 2010 or the Communications Act 2003 — despite their many centuries of proven effectiveness — might be antithetical to their desired ends.
Mr Goodall himself is an institutionalist who has been deeply concerned with guarding the mainstream from what he calls “eccentric thought”. Tellingly, he once described Kemi Badenoch as someone who has “imbibed an extreme free speech ideology” — an odd description of a huge supporter of curbing social media use and banning protests but an intriguing glimpse into Goodallite conventionalism.
In the same piece, Goodall took offence at Robert Jenrick saying (according to Goodall’s paraphrase) that “[the] grooming scandals prove somehow, that British integration has failed”. To be fair to Goodall, I’d be sympathetic to the argument that innumerable friendships, marriages and jobs well done prove that British integration has not absolutely failed. But if failure is construed in more general terms, and the grooming gangs scandal is considered alongside various other criminal, cultural and political phenomena, this is far from being some absurd and sinister claim. I wonder if Goodall had the twinge of a sense of this as Mr Yakoob started speculating loudly about his puppet masters.
I’ll extend an olive branch. In my earlier piece about Goodall’s gatekeeping, in 2024, I dismissed the idea that the “Popular Conservatives”, his target of choice, would become populist demagogues under “the liberal Liz Truss”. These days, Mrs Truss is trying very, very hard to become a populist demagogue — becoming the UK’s number one fan of Donald Trump (which, granted, is not a difficult thing to be). I’m perfectly willing to accept that there are tendencies on the right towards cynical opportunism, dangerous pseudoscience and, at the outer fringes, apocalyptic racialism.
Yet all too often a one-way focus on native radicalism, demagoguery, or, in Goodall’s words “eccentric thought” has obscured its non-traditional forms in Britain — the theocratic, the minoritarian, and the plain antisocial. Such wilful ignorance — here and elsewhere — has encouraged successive governments to double and triple down on their border-blind policies before the “success” of integration has been established.
I’m not expecting someone like Goodall to transform his worldview. The facts could lead one to various conclusions. But I’d like to think that continued attention to the dysfunctional outcomes of the modern establishment outlook will stick a fork into the spokes of his smug institutionalism. If nothing else, voices like Mr Yakoob’s are proof that the political and journalistic classes are not in control of what people think. Goodall and his News Agents colleagues Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel can sit around and clutch their brows over the state of things, but they are not gatekeepers — just podcasters.
