The result came just after 3am in a hot and crowded events venue across the canal from Wigan Pier. By that time, most in the room knew the outgoing Mayor of Greater Manchester would be heading back to Westminster. The whispered briefings from his allies had become increasingly confident in the previous hours as the votes were being counted.
When the 14 candidates lined up on stage, Andy Burnham took his place between a man dressed as a bin and another dressed as a fox. Then the exact numbers were formally declared, and the scale of his win was a genuine wow moment: a vote share of 54.8%, more than 9,000 votes ahead of Reform UK’s candidate Rob Kenyon, and thousands more votes than every other candidate combined.
“Andy Burnham wins Makerfield by-election with 54.8% vote share, defeating Reform UK by 9,000 votes.”
That result had seemed vanishingly unlikely after May’s local elections in Wigan, when Labour suffered unprecedented losses and Reform won in every council ward in the Makerfield constituency. But in this campaign the focus was on the Mayor, not his party. ‘Vote Andy’, read the posters emblazoned with an illustrated Burnham wearing his trademark thick-framed glasses. In his victory speech, he repeated one of his most frequently used phrases: “place first – not party first.”
As he left the by-election count, he did his best to avoid questions on the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour leadership. He was similarly tight-lipped after Labour’s defeat in the Gorton and Denton constituency, where he’d been previously blocked from standing by Labour’s National Executive Committee. Three decades in politics has taught Burnham not just to choose his words carefully, but to choose when he says them even more carefully.
Burnham is expected to seek the Labour leadership after his resounding victory. An “orderly transition” is Team Burnham’s preferred option, and one they seem to believe is possible. He will sit down with Starmer this weekend, and that chat will likely involve the ex-Mayor gently suggesting the PM set out a timetable for his departure. But all signs point towards a stubborn PM insisting he has a five-year mandate to serve the country, which could make things messy over the next week.
If this by-election was a test of whether ‘Brand Burnham’ could be a Reform-beating force, it has been proved. The road from Wigan Pier to Number 10 now seems that bit clearer for Burnham.