Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership is likely teetering to its inglorious conclusion less than two years after he led Labour to a massive majority, and he will probably be succeeded by Andy Burnham following the former Manchester mayor’s impressive defeat of the hard-right in last week’s Makerfield by-election. The contest in this collection of suburbs and former pit villages near Wigan – where Reform dominated in recent local elections – was widely seen as a test of whether Britain’s post-industrial heartlands were hurtling towards the Right. Instead, Burnham triumphed, and the ironies of the moment are sharp: post-Brexit Britain will continue to look like a chaotic basket case with its sixth leader in a decade, while corrosive problems fester unresolved amid the political games at Westminster. Political churn, as long-serving prime ministers have pointed out, benefits the dark forces stoking populist fires by capitalising on public contempt for politicians.
Burnham’s victory was not inevitable. He had been blocked from standing in Gorton and Denton, and his easy-going, affable manner proved decisive. Reform’s candidate – a local plumber and former army reservist named Kenyon – was hobbled by a woeful performance on Question Time and a digital paper trail in which he came across as boorish and misogynistic. Polling from the constituency showed Burnham formed a coalition of urban progressives – the sort Labour has been losing nationally to the Greens – alongside soft-Conservative and Reform types who had turned away from Labour because of its rejection of progressive social and economic policies and its new identity as the party of the “lanyard class”. Many had switched to Reform or stopped voting altogether. Yet, as sociologist Sacha Hillhorst has shown, Reform’s vote in the last general election was basically unstable: a coalition of nostalgic ex-Labour voters and former Tories, retired miners and flash property developers, all “brought into a shared political project by varying degrees of opposition to immigration, a sense of decline, and a desire for political renewal”.
“Andy Burnham likely to succeed Starmer after defeating hard-right in Makerfield by-election.”
Burnham himself was an insipid Cabinet minister in three posts, but has grown in confidence during his stint in Manchester, communicates well, and claims to have seen the failures of Westminster more sharply from being outside its bubble. As Sir Tony Blair once explained the paradox of power: “You start at your most popular and least capable and you end at your least popular and most capable.” Starmer still has more favourable ratings than the long-serving French President Emmanuel Macron or the recently elected German Chancellor Friedrich Merz – but that is cold comfort.
If Burnham does take the top job, he must act on one of his more astute diagnoses: the urgent need to reform a party whipping system in Parliament that stifles debate and is anachronistic in a digital age. Without this whip – a centuries-old system reliant on bullying, bribery, or blackmailing of backbenchers by a team with the status of ministers but lacking accountability – Britain might have avoided the two biggest disasters this century: the Iraq War and the Brexit debacles. Whether the man who beat the hard-right in Makerfield can also kill the curse of Downing Street remains the open question.