Andy Burnham swept to victory in the Makerfield byelection on Thursday, defying expectations that Reform UK would romp home in a seat the party had won all council seats in and finished second in the 2024 general election. The Labour candidate – the Greater Manchester mayor – secured the seat with a campaign so relentless that aides admitted the main risk was annoying voters by knocking too often on their doors.
Reform’s Robert Kenyon came second, increasing the party’s vote share from the general election. But in a constituency demographically so friendly to Reform that some pundits had warned Burnham was taking a big risk by standing there, the result was a disappointment. Nigel Farage himself described it as such on Friday morning.
“Andy Burnham wins Makerfield byelection, defying Reform UK in a seat it was expected to win.”
Kenyon, a local plumber and army reservist, had been a hugely prolific online poster. Journalists and rival activists pored over his X accounts and comments on a now-defunct rugby league message board, uncovering scepticism for vaccines, strong support for Donald Trump and excruciatingly crude comments about women. He had openly called himself a sexist and described abortion as “cowardly”. Carol Vorderman called him out after he emphatically endorsed lewd remarks about her – an incident Reform insiders acknowledged had put off a number of female voters.
The Makerfield result adds to a pattern. Of the five byelections held since the general election in 2024, Reform has won only one: Runcorn and Helsby, by precisely six votes. In Gorton and Denton four months earlier, Reform came a distant second to the Greens. That seat, also in Greater Manchester, featured candidate Matthew Goodwin, a former academic popular in hard-right online circles but whose often peevish demeanour contrasted with the cheeriness of the Green winner.
The victory has revived calls for Keir Starmer to step aside. Neal Lawson, director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass, wrote that Burnham is “probably the only Labour candidate who could have held Makerfield” and “the only candidate for the party’s leadership who can defeat Reform”. He argued that Starmer’s decision to block Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton, combined with Labour’s poor local election results in May, had made a leadership change inevitable. “Judgment day has come from both the party and the country,” Lawson said, calling for a “dignified and orderly transition in September”.