It’s what you Makerfield of it

How much credit does Andy Burnham deserve for staking his return to Westminster on a seat which, absent his candidacy and the unusual conditions of a by-election, would be forecast to lean very heavily towards Reform UK?

Some, at least. As Wes Streeting reminded us at some length yesterday, chickening out is always an option. The Manchester mayoralty is a comfortable office, and lost Prince Over the Water a flattering role in Labour mythology. He did not, in the end, have to jump.

But not, perhaps, as much as some of his supporters suggest. We hear now that Burnham plans to frame Makerfield, where incumbent MP Josh Simons has agreed to stand aside, into a proof-of-concept election, a demonstration that he has what it takes to take the fight to Reform.

Yet this is a post-hoc construction; as Labour people aren’t hesitating to tell journalists: “That might be believable if he hadn’t already asked 26 other MPs first.” The fact is that Burnham is standing in Makerfield because that is the seat his campaign managed to pry vacant. Yesterday morning speculation was focused instead on Manchester Rusholme, a Green-leaning seat, and prior to that his campaign had targeted several others. 

Regardless, he is standing. That itself is evidence of how weakened is Sir Keir Starmer’s position. Only a few months ago, he felt able to have Labour’s National Executive Committee block Burnham’s candidature for Gorton and Denton. No longer.

The stage is thus set for what will probably be a very strange contest. I cannot immediately think of another example of a by-election where a party’s candidate was standing with the explicit aim of unseating that party’s sitting prime minister. The Labour candidate will in effect be campaigning against the Labour Government. Again, the party is radiating wonderful quotes: “Cannot wait to be walking round Makerfield telling everyone to vote Labour to stop Starmer.”

There are also a lot of things we don’t know about the contest. Even with the Prime Minister formally acceding to Burnham’s attempt to re-enter the Commons, the timing of it is in the gift of the Labour Chief Whip, Jonathan Reynolds, who could if he so wished put the whole thing off by several months. Another critical variable is whether Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe’s right-wing splinter party, will seek to capitalise on its recent triumph in Great Yarmouth’s local elections by fielding a candidate. 

Allowing that, opinion seems to be very divided about what our expectations for the by-election should be. Based on the local elections, Makerfield is one of the most probable Reform gains in the entire country. But others point out that Burnham wasn’t on the ballot paper last week, and he polled very well in the seat at the 2024 Manchester mayoral election.

By-elections are also just very unusual contests. They are fought in unique conditions, with both the parties and the media able to concentrate resources to an extraordinary level; voters are also usually conscious that they are not choosing a government, although in this case they may well be. 

Ordinarily, responsible journalistic practice is to state this as a sort of disclaimer before spending days or weeks trying to extrapolate grand narratives from it anyway. And that isn’t entirely illegitimate, because politicians are as wont to see narrative significance in statistical fallacies as anyone else, and if they all behave as if something is true then to an extent it becomes true.

Thus, we can say with some confidence that a Reform victory over Burnham would likely plunge Labour into a crisis the depths of which we have seldom seen. A Britain which will not return him in a seat where he took over 60% of the vote just two years before is one where Labour might win fewer than 100 seats at the next election, and if the most popular politician in the country can’t win such a seat the odds of any other leadership contender reviving the party’s fortunes seem slim.

If he wins? That will depend, in part, on the margin of victory – especially if it is narrow and there is a Restore Britain spoiler candidate. 

Burnham will then have to confront the problems I laid out on our podcast, to whit that his personal ratings are based on a job in which he is not responsible for taxation, immigration, public spending, or any of the other issues that irradiate public opinion of national governments, and that there really is no obvious scope for increasing either borrowing or spending without precipitating a bond market panic and becoming the next Liz Truss.

I wonder also what sort of subtle impact on his premiership (if there is one) will attend his final choice (well, ‘choice’) of seat. Like the Conservatives, Labour finds its vote pulled in different directions that would seem to demand different policy responses, and being the man who saw off Reform is not quite the same thing as the man who saw off the Greens, as he might have been had he fought Manchester Rusholm.

Regardless, we have weeks and months to look forward to of ambitious Labour leadership hopefuls trying to navigate the treacherous waters between the whims of their membership and the suspicions of the bond traders. It promises to be quite the spectacle; if you put out of your mind for a while that you live in the country these people govern, it might even be fun. At last, Burnham Wood has come to Dunsinane.