Commons seat campaign by Greater Manchester mayor mid-term would drain resources, says Douglas Alexander
Labour’s decision to bar Andy Burnham from standing in a Westminster byelection was about “focus than about factionalism”, so the party would not be distracted ahead of vital elections in May, Douglas Alexander, the Scotland secretary, has said.
Defending the decision by the party’s national executive committee (NEC) to block the Greater Manchester mayor from being a candidate for the Gorton and Denton byelection, Alexander said this was not because Keir Starmer was scared of a leadership challenge.
The vote on Sunday by a sub-group of the NEC, including Starmer, has sparked an internal battle inside Labour, with a series of MPs and affiliated unions expressing anger at the decision.
Burnham said he was “disappointed”, promising to support whoever was selected to fight the seat vacated last week by Andrew Gwynne. But in a later tweet on Sunday, he seemed to predict that Labour would now lose the byelection.
