Britain seems all but certain to be heading towards a palace coup against the Prime Minister after Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham dramatically won this week’s by-election (special election), making him a member of Parliament once again and therefore eligible to challenge for leader.
Labour veteran Andy Burnham won Thursday’s Makerfield by-election by a greater than expected margin in results announced in the early hours of Friday morning, beating Reform’s Rob Kenyon into second place.
Burnham won 24,927 votes, taking 55 per cent, while Kenyon got 15,696 votes, at 35 per cent. The turnout was unusually high for a UK by-election at 59 per cent of eligible voters.
Nigel Farage reflected that Burnham had been buoyed by hatred for Prime Minister and despite his candidate losing out, reflected that Reform UK remains “the big national party on the centre right. A disappointing morning, but we keep going”.
The path to become Prime Minister is now open to Burnham. While it is clear Labour insiders have anointed him as Starmer’s replacement and anticipate a coronation, the Prime Minister has shown no indication that he’ll go easy.
Already having clung on to power after May’s disastrous national local elections results, the Starmer cabal are clear in their position that changing leader mid-term is a sign of weakness the public won’t respect. This may or may not be true, but doesn’t change the fact Starmer’s public approval rating is rock bottom and likely won’t ever recover.
Responding to the obvious fact that a leadership challenge is now to commence any day, Starmer insisted he would fight to the bitter end. He said this morning: “If there is a contest, then yes, I will stand. I have said repeatedly, I am not going to walk away from that.”
Burnham himself addressed a gathering of campaigners in Makerfield this morning and while he stopped short of actually speaking about challenging for the leadership, and hence office of Prime Minister, he spelled out clearly that he would be, and what he’d be campaigning on. The election “opened up the space for the real change” and had demonstrated “the need to change Labour”, he said, while reeling off a laundry list of national policies.
Changing Whitehall procurement rules to force buying British to aid reindustrialisation was his main pitch, while also signalling a major change to the education system to de-prioritise the push for the path to university for most young people started in the Blair era, and a focus on technical education to feed that re-industrialisation.
Beyond what he personally wants to do in power, Burnham also cited what he’d been told by voters in the course of this vote, acknowledging the policy area on the minds of many remains mass migration. He said: “I heard on so many doorsteps people’s concerns about the unfairness of the immigration system… these are the calls we’ve got to hear and this is the change that we’ve got to bring”.
There was also time for an attack line on Nigel Farage’s Reform, who challenged him for the seat, which he characterised as a party of “darkness and division”, even leaning on latent anti-American snobbery in the British left with a that warning votes for Reform could mean Britain becoming like the United States of America.
Today’s by-election victory, giving Burnham the Parliamentary seat Labour rules say is required to be party leader, and therefore leader of the largest Parliamentary party and Prime Minister with it, is the second time he has attempted to return to the house. An earlier seat vacated for his use by party rebels in January saw Starmer use his authority as party leader to block Burnham from standing at all, a trick the Prime Minister evidently decided he didn’t have the political capital to try twice.
Indeed, Burnham’s route to power has been littered with such setbacks at the hands of leading Labour figures. He has already run for party leader twice, twice losing out to zeitgeist candidates; net-zero extremist and sandwich dodger Ed Miliband in the first instance and the hard left’s Palestine obsessive Jeremy Corbyn in the other.
So while Burnham may have that spirit of the moment within the party itself — and backing of Labour insiders so apparently strong it may render the coming leadership election a mere formality — that is no promise of a national revival for Labour, no matter how well Burnham performed in a special election in his own back yard.
Firstly, he has already promised to govern under the terms of Labour’s 2024 election manifesto (party platform), meaning his space for manoeuvre is severely constrained and any polling bump from having a fresh face at the top is likely to be short lived. Perhaps one of Burnham’s greatest strengths is that he spent the whole Starmer era out of Westminster, yet short of calling a snap general election — that he can’t guarantee a clean win from — he steps straight into Starmer’s soiled shoes.
And then there are plenty within the Labour Party very much opposed to Burnham and his ‘soft left’ position. The Party has already split once in the past decade, with incumbent Starmer purging the party of its very hardest left upon taking power, and could split again as the left develops new obsessions ill-served by a relic of the Tony Blair era. It is even claimed that some present Labour Parliamentarians are in talks to defect to the Green Party.
More follows