[4] In the Financial Times, Nick Pearce noted that Goodwin's overall thesis is that events such as Brexit, the rising prominence of the radical right, and Johnson's 2019 general election victory are manifestations of a realignment in British politics, which pits marginalised, white working class, and older, socially conservative, non-graduate voters against a "new elite" of progressives who have been university-educated.
[7] Kenan Malik wrote that Goodwin's argument that members of what he portrays as the "new elite", including Gary Lineker, Mehdi Hasan and Sam Freedman, shape people's lives more than figures such as Rishi Sunak or Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England "is, to put it politely, stretching credulity".
[8] Similarly, Vladimir Bortun wrote that Goodwin "fails to demonstrate that the people occupying the most influential positions in British economic and political spheres share a “radically progressive” outlook.
Instead, he suggests, Goodwin uses "widely accepted observations" such as the erosion of differences between the Conservative and Labour Parties, a relative decline in social mobility and the rise of a broadly liberal middle-class, "to perform a series of logical and empirical leaps in the attempt to push a very transparent political agenda.
"[17] Owen Worth, Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick, praised the book's written style but argued that it "follows and repeats the same contradictions inherent within the ideologies of right-wing populist movements.
"[19] Sarah Manavis has noted that in response to negative reviews of the book, Goodwin has argued that "anyone who comes from a privileged background cannot effectively criticise his conclusions – that, by being part of the “new elite”, their arguments are null and void, their contradiction somehow proving his point."