By admin 
Britain has a new prime minister in waiting. Andy Burnham has wanted to lead the Labour Party for more than a decade, and now the deep unpopularity of the incumbent, Keir Starmer, has created a path to Downing Street for the Manchester mayor. Yesterday in Makerfield, a constituency outside Manchester in northern England, Burnham won a special parliamentary election that basically everyone understood to be both a referendum on Starmer’s leadership and a test of his own ability to defeat the radical right.
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He won the by-election in a blowout, and is expected to challenge Starmer almost immediately—by pressuring him behind the scenes to resign or, failing that, by triggering a leadership contest. Either way, Burnham is highly likely to come out on top. The question for Britain is whether his easygoing charm and gift for communication will be enough to successfully lead a grumpy, stagnant country that has already had six prime ministers since the Brexit referendum in 2016.
Burnham’s path to power is, funnily enough, more typical of American politicians than British ones. In 2017, after falling out of favor with the prevailing mood within Labour—he was seen as too centrist and pro-business—he left the proverbial swamp by quitting Parliament for a local position, much like a congressman leaving D.C. to run for governor. In Manchester, generally agreed to be a prosperous and revitalized city, Burnham has been able to build a strong personal following without the pressures of national government. Championing what he calls “Manchesterism,” an agenda that seized back power for the city from the bureaucrats and moneymen of London, he has become known as Labour’s King of the North.
To compete for party leader and prime minister, though, Burnham needed a parliamentary seat. Unfortunately for him, Starmer knew this too, and successfully blocked him from running in a special election in a different Manchester-area constituency in February. The seat went to the left-wing Greens, prompting bitter recriminations that Burnham alone could have held it for Labour.
And so Burnham engineered a special election of his own, by persuading the scandal-plagued member of Parliament in nearby Makerfield, Josh Simons, to step down. Recent polls predicted a Burnham victory, but far underestimated its extent. His 55 percent exceeded the combined total for the runner-up, from Nigel Farage’s populist right Reform, and the candidate from its new, even more hard-line challenger, Restore. By comparison, Labour is currently polling at just 19 percent nationally.
The speed with which Starmer has become unpopular is notable, even by the attention-deficit standards of recent British politics. After winning a 174-seat parliamentary majority in 2024, albeit with an underwhelming 34 percent of the vote, he has struggled to connect with the public. His terrible job-approval rating is superficially hard to understand, since his government has achieved significant victories: The railways are in the process of being renationalized—long a preoccupation of the left—while the volume of legal immigration and the number of migrants arriving in small boats have both fallen, fulfilling a demand of the right.
But the British economy remains sluggish. He tried to pass significant welfare cuts but failed because of a backbench rebellion. And he alienated elderly voters early on by attempting to remove one of their taxpayer-funded perks, the £300 (about $395) winter fuel allowance. Above all, Starmer has failed to communicate any kind of vision for Britain. He prided himself on refusing to be confined by the in-fighting of Labour’s past: Tony Blair’s business-friendly disciples against Gordon Brown’s pro-distribution faction, then both groups against Jeremy Corbyn’s unabashed socialists. But he was completely unable to define what it meant to be a Starmerite.
Hence the reemergence of Andy Burnham. This will be his third attempt at winning the Labour leadership. In 2010, he was little-known, and came in fourth. In 2015, he was too associated with “New Labour,” Blair’s centrist project, just as the party turned left and embraced Jeremy Corbyn. Burnham came second and subsequently decamped to Manchester.
Cynics think that Manchesterism is a mirage and that Burnham is unduly hogging the credit for the regeneration of the city’s downtown. Some suggest his superficial charm is giving a false picture of his political talents. In a notably skeptical profile, Joshi Herrmann of the independent Substack The Mill identified “a fatal weakness on Burnham’s part: he wants to be liked and he’s not particularly ruthless.”
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But Burnham was calculating enough. His posters in the Makerfield campaign mentioned his name, not his party affiliation; canvassers were instructed to say that they were “out campaigning for Andy Burnham” rather than Labour. His personal popularity helped win the seat, along with an Obama-style hopey-changey message. Both of those things will be hard to maintain if he becomes prime minister.
Still, Burnham has significant advantages over Starmer, who for now is insisting that he will not step down voluntarily. Burnham’s short-form videos are notably better than Labour’s current efforts. The popular image of Starmer is him standing stiffly at a lectern, while Burnham is comfortable walking and talking to camera, often to a soundtrack of ’90s soccer-dad classics. (The venerable Manchester band Oasis let him use their song “Some Might Say” for one ad in his parliamentary campaign.) He has been a capable frontman in moments of crisis: He was highly visible during Manchester’s response to the 2017 bombing at an Ariana Grande concert, as well as the city’s response to COVID.
Over the past decade, a repeated knock on Burnham has been that he is a political chameleon. As a Remainer campaigning in a Brexit-voting seat, he stayed vague on the subject of Britain’s future relationship with the European Union. Last year he argued that politicians paid too much attention to the bond markets; last month, he reassured them by committing to Labour’s current efforts to hold down government borrowing. He held a launch event for his 2015 Labour leadership campaign at the headquarters of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, to signal his business-friendly credentials. By 2022, however, he was describing that move as “tone-deaf,” and this time around, he has presented himself as an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–style economic populist, arguing that ordinary people’s living standards have been eroded by money flowing “into the hands of people for whom life was already very good” and arguing for a top tax rate of 50 percent. That shift reflects Labour’s leftward movement, as well as the recent success of the left-populist Greens.
The British electorate has fragmented. Labour now competes for left-wing votes not only with the Greens but with nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. In the middle sit the Liberal Democrats, who appeal to both anti-Brexit Conservatives and former Labour voters uninterested in the party’s leftward turn. Right-wing voters can now choose among the ailing Conservatives, Reform, or Restore. The last of these is backed by Elon Musk and traffics in language about race and immigration that has been absent from British electoral politics since the demise of the British National Party. That 7 percent of Makerfield voters chose Restore—even in the knowledge that doing so might deprive another anti-immigration party of victory—points to a deep well of racial grievance and anti-establishment anger that even Farage cannot command.
All of these dynamics make special elections particularly unpredictable: Reform lost two recent ones to the Greens and Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. And on the same day Burnham triumphed in Makerfield, the Conservatives won a parliamentary seat in Scotland from the Scottish Nationalist Party. The next national election will occur no later than 2029, and which party ends up with the most seats is anyone’s guess.
The circumstances of the Makerfield by-election make it an imperfect bellwether for national politics. Both Burnham and the Reform candidate, Rob Kenyon, presented their campaign as a chance to give the Labour prime minister a kicking. Farage, Reform’s attention-grabbing but divisive leader, was a curiously low-key presence. Kenyon, a plumber whose past social-media posts prompted allegations of sexism, was an underwhelming candidate. None of that stopped lots of British journalists turning up in Makerfield to write about the irresistible lure of Reform to working-class voters. Somehow, these articles never get written the other way around: No one opines that British voters long for a guy who served in Gordon Brown’s government and voted for the Iraq War, as Burnham did.
But people are more open-minded and pragmatic than many political commentators assume, and Burnham has long since shrugged off his association with previous eras of Labour. In the end, his pitch was simple—he is the only man who can save Labour and, by extension, Britain. This, he told his supporters on election night, was Labour’s “final chance to change.” Now, Britons will find out if that’s true.