Triumph in Makerfield: Everything is about to change

Andy Burnham is now certain to be the next prime minister

A comprehensive, thumping result and an absolute vindication. Andy Burnham won the Makerfield byelection for Labour with a performance which shattered pollsters’ predictions. Labour came in with 54.8% to Reform’s 34.5%, with Restore coming third on 6.8%. Some disparate thoughts below.

Andy Burnham is the next prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

It is now near-impossible to imagine any other outcome. Burnham will be the next prime minister and the process for that will probably be decided fairly quickly.

The core issue is not that he won, it’s that he won so resoundingly. This is a performance right far exceeding the top end of expectations. In the local elections recently held in the constituency’s wards, Reform were on 50% to Labour’s 27%. Burnham has almost reversed that. Turnout, which usually falls in byelections, rose by 6.2% to 58.7%.

If Burnham had won by a few percentage points, or had won by less than the combined Reform and Restore vote, then things might be complicated. Keir Starmer would have continued to stress that he would fight a contest, making this a bloody and drawn-out battle for No.10. Perhaps he’ll still try to do this. But all hope of that is surely lost now. Labour ministers will see this and recognise the political reality of it. Labour MPs will see it and want Burnham to start immediately. He has proved that he is a Reform killer. He has shown that he can unite progressive voters. Any remaining obstacles to him becoming prime minister have been shattered.

It’s not even clear if a leadership contest will take place. The result is so comprehensive that Burnham is clearly going to win it, so Wes Streeting may decide to step aside and go for a Cabinet position instead. Honestly, I think that is a mistake: Labour needs a debate about ideas. But this is now the most likely direction of travel.

The best scenario now would be for Starmer to announce his intention to stand down in autumn, allowing Burnham to launch his premiership at the Labour party conference. This gives him dignity in his departure, but it would also give the former Manchester mayor time to prepare.

Reform is dying out there, absolutely dying on its arse

Once again, Nigel Farage has been humiliated.

This is not just a result of Burnham’s performance. It is a result of Farage’s specific weakness and incompetence. It is the third time it has happened. In Caerphilly, Reform was supposed to demonstrate that it was going to redefine Welsh politics. It lost to Plaid Cymru. In Gorton and Denton, it was supposed to demonstrate its ability to operate in urban constituencies. It lost to the Greens. Now it has lost to Burnham, with its vote only rising three points on its 2024 general election performance.

This is in no small part due to Farage’s inadequacies as a leader. Yes, he is very good at going on television and speaking fluidly and getting people to hate one another. But he is not very good at any political activity outside of that tight remit.

He is noticeably poor at candidate selection. In Gorton and Denton he chose Matt Goodwin, a man who sounds like Chat GPT and, it turns out, writes like it too. This was what a highly online political mind would do - pick someone who really pisses off liberals. But it’s not what a successful election-winner would do. It turned out Goodwin was a shit candidate: obviously self-interested, uncharismatic, self-pitying, preening and ineffective. His long history of online radical-right activism meant he had all sorts of comments in his past which could be used against him. So lo and behold, Labour trawled through his social media, his articles, his TV appearances and his newsletters and repackaged them into ammunition.

Now it’s happened again, with Farage making exactly the same mistake: a piss-poor candidate, who could charitably be called unvarnished but could uncharitably be described as a fucking moron, with a catastrophic online history to his name.

With a crap candidate in place, Farage then decided to go on TV after a murder case and expressly disrespect the father of the victim. He spent much of the campaign actively trying to encourage race riots. This was obscene, but it was also something more prosaic: it was electorally unwise.

Farage is, it goes without saying, a moral stain upon this country’s reputation, the fag-brown teeth of a rotting corpse. But he is also, and this is underdiscussed, a hapless clown. His competence is as degraded as his ethics.

Women will destroy Reform

This is the second time that women specifically have played a key role in hurting Reform. In Gorton and Denton, comments from Goodwin emerged in which he thought we should “explain to young girls and women the biological reality” of when they should have kids to deal with population decline. This was self-defeating, because the idea of having Goodwin explain reproduction to you would make most women instantly infertile, thereby cratering British birth rates even further.

It hurt him electorally. Then, in Makerfield, the exact same process played out again. Candidate Robert Kenyon said that women get abortions so they can “shag anyone they want” and that he was a proud “sexist”.

Reform didn’t discipline him - not because it is inept, but because sexism is basically party policy. The party’s proposed “women and motherhood protection act” reverses women’s equality protections back to the 1970s and extends the time limit for pregnancy and maternity claims of unfair dismissal. It’s connected to a global far-right movement that wants to return women to traditional gender roles and dress them like a milkmaid in the 18th Century

Reform’s problem, and it is a very significant one, is that women vote. After Kenyon’s comments, pollsters started to pick up a distinction between male and female voting intention patterns. Journalists visiting the constituency noticed the same. On the Question Time, one member of the audience listened to Kenyon lambast Burnham for his ambition then replied: “I’d rather have a career politician than a plumber who’s a sexist.”

Sexism has many defects, but today the most pertinent one was electoral.

Nigel Farage has lost his sheen

If the combined Restore and Reform vote had totalled more than Burnham got, Farage could perhaps have turned this to his advantage, he would have used it to try and consolidate support on the right. But that did not happen. Instead, he ended up in the worst of all possible worlds.

Restore got seven per cent. This is negligible on a national level, but if you replicated it at a general election it would cost Reform a great many crucial seats. Hell, if you replicated their current four per cent, it would probably deprive Farage of victory. In a five party democracy, these are the kinds of margins which define outcomes.

There was nothing anomalous about Makerfield, nothing that made it unusually resistant to Farage’s charms. In fact, quite the opposite. This is core Reform territory: Older white voters without a university education. Reform central. At the 2024 election, the party won 31.8% of the vote - the sixth highest in the country. If you were going to secure a Commons majority, you would need to be taking places like Makerfield with ease.

Farage has relied extensively on the belief of his inevitability. That belief is now crumbling before our eyes. A few weeks back, during the local elections, the decline in Reform support was too subtle to be noticed by many journalists, because the party was still coming out on top. Now, the series of fuck-ups is so severe than even the most superficial herd-like reporters have begun to pick up that something is going wrong: the race riots, the piss-poor candidates, the threat on his right flank, the persistent underperformance, the loss of the women’s vote, the look of fear in his eyes when he’s asked about that £5 million donation.

It’s all starting to come apart for him. And now Labour is changing leaders.

Can we just accept for a minute that Burnham is good at this stuff

Here is Burnham after the vote, in his victory speech:

“There will be no second chance, but it is a chance now, from this result tonight, to build a new politics based on unity and hope, turning away from the path that takes us to a divided politics of the kind we’ve seen in the United States. We must now take this path and put this country back on the right path, and bring people back together and get things working properly again.”

Can you think of a better message than that? These are the right values, expressed in the right way: Reject division, prevent a slide into the US horror story, embrace hope, get things working.

People often say to me that Burnham is just Starmer with better comms. I don’t think that’s right, but even if it were the case it would still be a considerable improvement from where we are right now, which is Starmer with bad comms - a prime minister who simply cannot communicate with the public, who has no story to tell and could not articulate it if he did.

Look at the words in that passage. Look at how short they are. Look at how easy-to-understand it is. Look at how clear the narrative is: presenting the threat, presenting the solution, making the broadest possible pitch, outlining how you get there. Just good old fashioned effective political communication of the type we forgot existed.

Burnham looks happy to have the camera on him. This is that element of political leadership which simply cannot be learned and is honestly fairly intrinsic. Some politicians look like they want the camera off them - Starmer seems desperate for it to go away and leave him alone - whereas some beam into it, temporarily sated by the fact it is gazing upon them - Boris Johnson is the most obvious example of this tendency.

Burnham has this strange combination of attributes. He drinks in the attention, but seems genuinely self-effacing. All his movements and mannerisms reflect humility. Obviously this is partly artificial - there’s a killer in there somewhere, we’ve all seen that - but it seems to also be partly genuine. He combines charisma and natural ease with modesty.

He is just very good at this stuff. And this stuff is not nothing. We’ve seen in the last two years that it matters.

We’re going to find out what the Burnham story is soon

All this storytelling ability won’t matter much if Burnham has no story to tell.

This could go one of two ways. Burnham has presented two versions of himself on the campaign trail. The first is quite Starmer-like, with a series of concessions to the cultural right: He has rejected joining the EU in the near future, praised Shabana Mahmood’s immigration reforms, and walked back his previous commitment to trans rights.

We don’t know how much of that was about the fact he was campaigning in a socially conservative seat. It’s possible, but not probable, that he will adopt more liberal positions in power.

More pertinently, we do not know how far he wants to go. Perhaps he thinks that he can use these Starmer-era olive branches to social conservatives, keep them as a package of measures to keep those voters on side, but not go any further. This would suggest that Burnham will not erase the errors of the last two years, but he will at least not worsen them.

There is then the other side of him. There are areas he has long concerned himself with and has referred to endlessly for very many years. One of them is devolution. Another is electoral reform. A third, which is less noticed, is his diagnosis of the many flaws in the Westminster system, and in particular the way the institutional incentives encourage superficial adversariality instead of pragmatic cooperation. He is very sound on this last part in particular.

So which version are we going to get? Who knows. We’re about to find out. Perhaps both. But the outcome is not solely in his hands. It also depends on what people do.

Optimism is a political act

As I keep on saying in this newsletter, optimism is a political act. It is easy to sit there and find reasons to be cynical about Burnham. Liberals are so used to losing in the ten years since the Brexit vote that some now display a knee-jerk hostility to even the possibility of positive change. The crushing betrayal of the Starmer years really made this feeling seem inevitable: Whoever wins, we lose. But there are as many reasons to be upbeat as there are to despair.

The politics of optimism is not about simply hoping for the best then getting a beer and watching telly. It is a reminder that politics is the art of the possible.

People usually say this about the decisions a political leader makes. But it also applies to the way that electorates can guide those leaders. I am not saying it will definitely work out well. What I am saying is: There is a lot to work with here. Politics is about doing what you can with the raw material in front of you and the raw material here is of an unusually high quality: a person with proven communication skills and decent values. We can spend the next three years complaining about his defects or encouraging his virtues. The latter option seems more sensible.

The anti-fascist majority in this country is a thing of beauty

It is easy to despair of the British public. We elect a prime minister who wants to introduce austerity at the worst possible time, he fucks it so bad that we decide to leave the EU, which then causes so much chaos that we elect a series of clowns to fix it, including a man who cannot fully dress himself, then finally put a Labour government back in charge, start complaining when it takes longer than six months to fix things, and decide that we might as well get the bloke who first suggested Brexit to fix it. It’s like watching the Traitors: Cock-up after cock-up after cock-up, with no lessons learned in between.

But over the last two years, as the threat of Reform has reared its head, it has been truly inspiring to see the British public go to work. Over and over again, in byelections and local elections, they ask for the same thing: Just show me who to vote for. Show me who is best placed to beat Reform and I will back them. It doesn’t matter who it is. It could be a Welsh nationalist, a Lib Dem, hell it can even be the Conservatives. They are clamouring for a way to show Farage he is not welcome here.

Two years ago, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens won 11% in Markerfield. Last night they got a combined one per cent. Three hundred and eight people voted Green. A hundred and sixty three voted Lib Dem. We’ve seen this over and over again. A great big chunk of voters really do not care that much who the party is. They want to make Reform lose. They want to hurt Farage. And they will do it any way they can.

Quite apart from any tactical measure, it is just such a beautiful thing to see. Print journalism is intent on dragging this country into the ugliest authoritarian terrain. Broadcast journalists do not challenge it, assuming that the real soul of the country is only understood by right-wing populists. Starmer and his advisers have evidently concluded the same thing.

But over and over again, British voters, in seats across the UK, have come out to prove them wrong. They want a sign of how to hurt Farage and then they want to deliver the blow personally.

They have now created a situation in which Reform is bleeding profusely, horribly damaged. What glorious people they are.