The horns came first. Every two or three minutes, a van or small truck drew level with John Harris and John Domokos on the main road through Hindley, and there it was: a honk, and a full-throated shout of “Reform!” That was the day before the voters of Makerfield chose their new MP. But on the other side of the street stood the house of a man called Les, who had no less than seven placards adorned with the logo of Rupert Lowe MP’s new mega-right outfit, Restore Britain. “Farage has lost it,” Les told them.
Les was right. When the votes were counted, Labour’s Andy Burnham triumphed with 55% of the vote, Reform UK on 35%, and Restore managing 7%. The margin placed Burnham 6,100 votes ahead of Reform and Restore combined – a decisive rejection of the insurgent right in a constituency reckoned to be 97% white British and replete with the grievances Reform feasts on. Just months earlier, in the May local elections, Reform had managed a vote-share of 50.4% in the same wards, with Labour trailing miserably on 22.7%.
“Andy Burnham wins Makerfield by-election with 55%, defeating Reform and Restore.”
The result has prompted fresh talk of “peak Farage”, a phrase first heard back in 2014 when UKIP won the most votes in European parliament elections. Reform UK’s average poll rating has fallen by around five percentage points from its late-2025 high, and the by-election defeat – with a candidate, Robert Kenyon, described as hopeless – has exposed a party struggling to maintain its insurgent sheen. “You cannot style yourself as the insurgent outsider for ever,” wrote the Guardian’s John Harris, who spent six days in the constituency.
For Labour, the victory was both a feat of tireless mass campaigning and a testament to Burnham’s extremely rare standing as a politician. The video dispatch from Harris and Domokos, titled “Burnham’s Britain: six days in the place that just changed our politics”, captured an infectious spirit of optimism in a place where people’s lives back up Burnham’s insistence that the economy and society need radical change. But Harris cautioned that for Labour, there is still a long and arduous journey ahead.