Andy Burnham swept to a thumping victory in the Makerfield by-election on Thursday, winning 55% of the vote and beating Reform UK’s candidate, Rob Kenyon, by more than 9,000 votes. The result was a “dramatic, emphatic win for Andy Burnham,” Nigel Farage conceded the next day – but the Reform leader was quick to blame the defeat on a desire among voters to “eject Sir Keir Starmer from Downing Street”.
“In many ways, he’s a popular local mayor, just as Boris Johnson was a popular mayor in London just a few years ago,” Farage said of Burnham in a video posted online. “But what really happened here is it was ‘vote Burnham, get Starmer out’.”
“Burnham wins Makerfield with 55%; Farage blames anti-Starmer vote, Reform reviews candidate’s sexist posts”
The Reform leader admitted he was “disappointed” with his party’s 34% vote share, well short of the 18,000 votes he had hoped for. “I thought we’d get 18,000 votes, we got just shy of 16 [thousand],” he said. Farage also pointed to the 7% won by Restore Britain, the rival right-wing party founded by ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe, and urged its supporters to “think again” and back Reform instead.
But behind the public spin, the party is examining whether sexist comments by Kenyon may have cost it votes. Canvassers from different parties reported that voters highlighted sexist and lewd social media posts by Kenyon, which emerged during the campaign, with women in particular saying they were put off. The issue rose to prominence after TV presenter Carol Vorderman demanded an apology from Kenyon following a graphic discussion about her in since-deleted posts. “I will admit that the Vorderman stuff did not help us,” a Reform source told the Guardian.
One Reform activist said the party had advised Kenyon not to apologise for the comments. “That’s something that was not his fault, it was how he was advised,” they said. Kenyon did not apologise but sought to present the posts as showing he was an ordinary person.
Farage, meanwhile, acknowledged that Reform had been “slightly hoist with our own petard”, having previously framed elections as a chance for voters to end Starmer’s premiership – the same message Burnham successfully employed. The Labour mayor, who has been in office in Greater Manchester since 2017, used his victory speech to make his most explicit statement yet about challenging Starmer. “This result will bring about a country that works fairly for everywhere and everybody,” Burnham said, calling the by-election “a final chance to change” for the unpopular Labour government.
The new MP is expected to trigger a leadership challenge. As polls closed, the New Statesman reported that Burnham already has the nominations he needs. For Reform, the blame game has begun, with party insiders saying tactical voting could cost them the keys to No 10 in 2029 – and that Farage must “get on top of this” to win power.