The Makerfield by-election turned into a “Breakerfield” outcome for Sir Keir Starmer’s ebbing premiership. While Labour struggles to execute a bloodless coup to replace the PM however, another party is under growing pressure.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK had a poor result in the south Wigan seat: its ebullient leader admitted over the weekend that frustration with Starmer drove the “emphatic” victory of Andy Burnham. The local Reform candidate, Robert Kenyon, however, finished more than 9,000 votes behind him.
Kenyon was an inexperienced, uncharismatic choice and there was only so far to run on his reputation as a down-to-earth, local plumber. But this also revealed a problem which is exercising Reform strategists – why is candidate selection going wrong? It failed also in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, where the choice of the earnest, former academic Matthew Goodwin was a luckless fit.
One way or the other, Reform is not on a winning streak. It is also seeing a trickle of re-defections to the Tories, recently in the Medway – a prime target. The Farage army also lost votes to Restore Britain, whose entire existence is down to a breakdown in relations between two dominant characters – Farage and Rupert Lowe – over internal turf wars.
