Labour’s by-election loss – slipping into a poor third place in the face of a spectacular win by the insurgent Green Party – was a true humiliation for Sir Keir Starmer, not least because he totally owned it.
It was the Prime Minister’s decision to block Andy Burnham, the popular Manchester Mayor, from standing as Labour’s candidate in Gorton & Denton. On Monday, Starmer visited the constituency, a rare by-election move for a prime minister, amid bullish predictions his party had a very good chance of victory. Both decisions were attracting a fair deal of criticism from Labour insiders last night.
As the votes piled up, Labour sources at the count became ever gloomier. “Greens have done it,” proclaimed one text message at 11.30pm. In the end, Labour finished more than 5,000 votes behind them in what was meant to have been a knife-edge contest. Reform UK edged past Labour into second place, seen as a middle-ranking result for Nigel Farage’s party, whose candidate provocatively claimed we were seeing ‘dangerous Muslim sectarianism’ at the end of a campaign marred by toxicity.
Starmer, dogged by deep and unshifting levels of personal unpopularity, now faces renewed speculation about his future – although an immediate challenge seems unlikely as no rival candidate appears quite ready to strike. However, the threat posed by local, regional, Scottish and Welsh elections across the country on 7 May looms even larger, with Labour looking nervously over its shoulder at the Greens’ ability to outflank them on the Left in towns and cities.
Politically, the government will face big pressure to tack further to the left: indeed, this direction of travel is already apparent with No 10’s floating of a social media ban for under-16 year olds, more talk of closer links with Europe and a greater willingness to take issue with Reform’s strident anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Downing Street’s ‘hero voter’ strategy of pursuing Reform-coded, Brexit-sympathetic electors, most closely associated with recently departed Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, now looks dead in the water and will be largely unlamented across the party. The trouble is that, with key positions in No10 still unfilled, there is no sign yet of any alternative electoral approach – leaving the Greens in pole position to fill the gap, as the by-election showed.
No10 and Treasury strategists will be relieved that the bond markets, the stock market and the pound were holding steady this morning without signs of reacting to the by-election. Their plan is to camp behind some better economic news, including a rise in retail sales, and make Tuesday’s Spring Statement deliberately low-key: simply a canter through economic forecasts and a ‘political narrative’, likely to include a promise of better times ahead, according to government sources.
The Greens’ spectacular victory (the party’s best performance in a by-election up to now had been 10 per cent of votes, here they got 41 per cent) allowed their leader Zack Polanski to push his flagship policies of a wealth tax and rent controls – something that is likely to alarm many business leaders, not least through fear that the government tacks in the same direction.
However Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, handed the poisoned chalice of a breakfast media round after a crushing defeat, was quick to draw firm dividing lines between Labour and the Greens, particularly on defence and security, denouncing the ‘fairy tales’ peddled by Zack Polanski’s party, and looking ahead to a slew of announcements helping to cut the cost of living in the weeks and months ahead.
Angela Rayner, the former Deputy Prime Minister, seen as a possible future challenger for the leadership, warned the Prime Minister that the result should be a ‘wake-up call.’
By-election protest votes against unpopular governments are, of course, far from uncommon. But this one felt more significant than usual, both for the further proof it offered of the fragmentation of the two-party system and the continuing deep uncertainty surrounding the Prime Minister’s future.
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