It goes without saying that anything other than a stonking Labour hold – in one of their safest 2024 seats – was never going to go down well with pundits. But the ferocity of this morning’s political commentary – Starmer must go, he’s electoral suicide, this is terminal – reflects the scale of the humiliation accurately: this was a 26 point swing against Labour in a seat that couldn’t be more traditionally Labour if it tried.
Across the board, there’s a rare consensus that this by-election is Labour’s ghost of Christmas future, rattling its chains. But what about everyone else’s future?
The Reform candidate Matthew Goodwin suffered a bad loss (original joke, no?), which suggests that Reform may have slightly overplayed their hand. For months now, Reform has cultivated a reputation as an insurgent force marching forward while the old parties rot. But not only are they stagnating in the polls, when handed what looked like a clean shot at a by-election scalp, they still couldn’t seal the deal.
Why? Because up until now, Reform has been fighting an air war. Social media algorithms and GB News hosts are doing the graft. But Gorton and Denton was a ground war. It was soggy leafleting. It was knocking on doors that don’t open and smiling anyway (just in case of a ring doorbell). It was freezing fingers shoved through snapping letterboxes. And that is a young person’s game.
Reform might have a lot of young followers on Tiktok, or councillors still doing their A levels, but do they have droves of eager youngsters desperate to spend their Saturdays getting doors slammed in their faces? No, they don’t. That particular brand of foot soldier used to belong to Labour (trust me, I was one of them), but now arguably may prove to be the Greens’ greatest weapon come May and beyond.
Which brings us neatly to the winners – the Greens. But parts of the Green campaign suggest that the party traditionally caricatured as peace-and-love hippies might need to get comfortable playing a little dirtier.
They’ve been accused by Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage of fuelling sectarianism, after promotional material circulated in Urdu and Bangla focused on different issues to the English-language counterparts, and featured images of Starmer with Narendra Modi, or David Lammy with Benjamin Netanyahu. Some leaflets urged voters to “make Labour pay” for Gaza.
The Greens now face a choice. Do they own this sharper-elbowed politics, or retreat to the comfortable familiarity of being everyone’s favourite harmless idealists? You don’t get to play with the big dogs and insist you’re still above the mud.
And if they are serious, they need to tighten up elsewhere. Two of their campaign videos inexplicably mentioned Coronation Street (what focus group told them that was a good idea?) and they looked like GCSE drama coursework. Away from social media, they need to nail the lines on their more eccentric policy positions – namely on the decriminalisation of drugs and their wishy-washy stance on Nato.
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The only Labour man who’s had a good morning is Andy Burnham. Blocked by the NEC from standing, he’s come out of this far better than he may have hoped when he fired his unsuccessful warning shot. Would Labour have won with Burnham? Well, some anti-Starmer voters might have rallied to him as a kind of internal protest vehicle. But you can’t exactly stick “elect me to depose my own leader” on a Labour-branded leaflet.
More importantly, he’s avoided the trap. Had he stood and lost, he’d have been humiliated and would have also forfeited his mayoralty. Had he stood and won, he’d be shackled to a flailing government. Instead, he campaigned loyally for Labour, kept his hands clean, and now gets to sit comfortably in the much more powerful realm of counterfactual fantasy: if only we’d had Burnham.
The news that Jeremy Corbyn has trounced Zarah Sultana in the Your Party leadership elections, after months of internal spatting worthy of Game of Thrones, has gone rather under the radar. The timing is ironic, because the Greens’ breakthrough raises a brutal question: what exactly is Your Party for now if progressive and minority voters are willing to back the Greens in a Labour stronghold?
The only difference between the parties now is leaders – and yes, while Corbyn has more experience than Polanski, and a die-hard base, he also has far more enemies and a warehouse full of baggage. Polanski, by contrast, has so far endured little worse than playground jokes about breast enlargement, which, in the current climate, probably helps rather than harms him. If Sultana had any sense, she’d have seen which way the tide was turning long ago and joined the Greens. I wouldn’t say it was out of the question.
Meanwhile, the Tories and the Lib Dems barely got more than a thousand votes between them. They didn’t throw the kitchen sink at it, but it is still the clearest evidence yet that Britain’s old system is dead. Polling already shows a three, four or even five-horse race. John Curtice warned this morning that Labour are fighting a war on two fronts. But what if it’s more than two?
The uncomfortable truth is that Reform knows who they’re for. At the very least, the Greens know who they are against and in today’s zero-sum political climate, that clarity can matter just as much.
Everyone is cannibalising everyone else. It’s going to be a good old fashioned pub brawl for the next three years to see who comes out with the least chunks bitten out of them.
The party system as we know it looks finished and I don’t think I’m alone in admitting: I have absolutely no idea what comes next.
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