Many of us said Makerfield would be close. How wrong we were. In the end, Andy Burnham won by 9,231 votes, a margin of almost 20 per cent. Labour got 55 per cent of the vote, compared with 45 per cent at the 2024 election. Those figures give Burnham’s challenge to Keir Starmer’s premiership huge momentum and authority. He looks unstoppable and should be PM within weeks.
Makerfield is truly the most significant by-election in British history.
The result is a complete turn-around from Gorton and Denton, the by-election in February, also in Greater Manchester. There Starmer’s henchmen stopped Burnham from being the candidate, and Labour suffered a calamitous defeat to the Greens, coming third behind Reform. Labour’s vote dropped 25 per cent in Gorton and Denton. In Makerfield it was up 9.5 per cent, an astonishingly good result for a government party two years into office.
Andy Burnham took a huge personal gamble in fighting the seat: had he lost it might have destroyed his career.
If Makerfield was something of a referendum between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham; I noticed how many voters treated it as a choice between Andy Burnham and Nigel Farage, the two most popular figures in British politics. And Farage lost.
