Here are the vote counts for the candidates in first, second and third place:

• Hannah Spencer (Green Party): 14,980 votes
• Matt Goodwin (Reform UK): 10,578 votes
• Angeliki Stogia (Labour Party): 9,364 vote

Matt Goodwin, the GB News presenter standing for Reform UK in this month’s Gorton and Denton byelection, says he wants his “country back”. But Good Law Project can reveal that he received a salary of up to €10,000 a month from a far-right pressure group based in Hungary.

Goodwin has been speaking at Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) events since 2024 and seems to have served as a “visiting fellow” since at least last summer, when he returned to Budapest in August to speak on a panel moderated by the British anti-trans commentator Joanna Williams.

According to leaked documents obtained by Direkt 36, visiting fellows are paid between €5,000 and €10,000 per month “plus housing, office space, health insurance and, where appropriate, family support”. The fellowship ranges from two weeks to a year, but Direkt 36 found that it’s common for fellows to continue on a retainer. The investigation also found one-off guest speakers from abroad are paid handsomely: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son was paid €7,000 for two one-hour panel discussions.

MCC is a college and propaganda outfit for Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán based in Budapest. It is funded in part by a 10% stake in MOL Group – an energy giant that refines oil, most of which comes from Russia.

Last week, we revealed how MCC has spent more than £500,000 giving a megaphone to extreme rightwing voices in the UK. The college is plugged into an influence operation built around the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation – a network that includes Nigel Farage’s senior adviser and anti-abortion theologian James Orr, the Spectator editor and former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove, the anti-trans figurehead Kathleen Stock and the Palantir co-founder and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel.

In October 2025, Goodwin spoke at the Roger Scruton symposium at the Hungarian Embassy in London alongside other figures from the British right, MCC representatives and officials from Hungary’s energy and European Union Affairs ministries.

Earlier this week, the anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate passed us their research into Goodwin’s fellow campaigners. They had identified five separate individuals who had been out campaigning with Goodwin who had shared racist content online or expressed support for far-right groups. In some cases, there is little grey area: Goodwin’s campaigners have expressed clear support for the far-right group Britain First, baselessly suggested that 60-70% of transgender people are paedophiles or posted online that Muslims are only in the UK because they wish to “conquer” it.

This is interesting for a few reasons, one of which is the fact that Nigel Farage has always been at pains to distance his party from known far-right groups. He’s been publicly critical of Tommy Robinson on many occasions, and as UKIP leader he banned ex-British National Party members from running for his party.

And yet Goodwin, who is striving to become Farage’s ninth MP, and whose victory would probably represent the biggest and most significant one so far for Reform, appears to have surrounded himself with exactly the kinds of characters Farage claims he keeps at a distance.

Chief among these is Adam Mitula, who is currently serving as Reform UK’s interim campaign manager in Tameside. On his Facebook page Mitula has posted photos of himself with what appears to be a small team assisting Goodwin in his bid to become MP, also including Tameside councillor Allan Hopwood (who you might remember from this Mill interview) and Rob Barrowcliffe, Tameside’s interim Reform branch chair.

Mitula is an entrepreneur who has been involved in various businesses, including in real estate, crypto and Fintech. He was born in Szczecin, Poland, and on his website he says he was raised in a traditional Catholic culture and drew inspiration from Arnold Schwarzenegger in his weightlifting pursuits.

Mitula’s output, posted on social media, includes his suggestion that “60-70%” of transgender people are paedophiles, the fact he would “never touch a Jewish woman”, and his use of the n-word. Meanwhile, discussing the number of people who died in the Holocaust in July 2024, he appears to try and play down the statistics, writing: “6 million polish [sic] people including some Jews. They always use Poles to make up the number. And on top of it they claim Poles were killing. Just sick.”

All my nudes gone.

Many trans children socially transition, such as taking on new names, pronouns, haircuts and uniforms, to better embrace their gender identity.

But new advice published yesterday says this needs to be agreed by the school and parents must be involved in the ‘majority’ of cases.

Social transition should only happen ‘very rarely’ in primary schools, stressing that decisions ‘may not be the same as a child’s wishes’.

This is a far cry from a 2023 draft produced under the Conservatives, which said youngsters should not be able to use different pronouns.

Sir Keir Starmer’s fightback against an attempted Labour leadership coup has been overshadowed by a fresh scandal involving one of his closest former aides.

Labour announced on Tuesday evening that it had suspended Sir Keir’s former communications chief Matthew Doyle, whom the prime minister elevated to the House of Lords in December, over his links to a convicted paedophile, former councillor Sean Morton.

The latest development will raise fresh questions over Sir Keir’s integrity and judgement, with echoes of the Peter Mandelson scandal, which has already cost him his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and brought his premiership to the brink of collapse.

Lord Mandelson was made ambassador to the US – the UK’s most important diplomatic role – despite the prime minister knowing of his ongoing relationship with the convicted paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

And now, Lord Doyle, who retains his peerage despite being stripped of the party whip, has revealed that he, too, had kept in contact with Morton, even after he was convicted.

Unomelon, the developer of Minecraft-inspired sandbox game Allumeria, says a DMCA from Microsoft, evidently related to Minecraft, got the game removed from Steam.

"The Allumeria Steam page is currently down because Microsoft has filed a false DMCA claim on it," Unomelon said on Bluesky on Tuesday. "They sent an email earlier today claiming that this screenshot infringes on their copyright. I am taking a moment to figure out what my path is going forward, will update soon."

The screenshot in question (above) is a simple wide shot of a forest filled with birch trees, what look to be oak trees with green and autumnal leaves, and a few pumpkins and weeds checkering the grassy dirt. There are definitely some similarities to Minecraft; if you told me this was a screenshot of a Minecraft mod, I'd probably believe you, but that's true of many voxel-based games, including Hytale.

Direct link to the Bluesky post (Skylib)