Robert Peston@Peston
In May’s local elections, Labour’s implied vote share was 24.3% and Reform’s was more than 50%. Last night Labour’s Andy Burnham received about 55% of the vote, a full 20 percentage points more than Reform’s Robert Kenyon.
So Burnham returned what looked like a safe Reform seat back into a Labour seat. Perhaps as significantly, he also increased Labour’s vote share by ten percentage points vis à vis Reform compared with the 2024 general election, which his predecessor Josh Simons won.
In other words, there is zero ambiguity around last night’s result. The so-called Burnham factor turned Labour’s humiliation in relation to Reform into Labour victory, at least in this north-western constituency.
And Reform cannot blame Restore Britain’s Rebecca Shepherd to Kenyon’s right for splitting the vote. In the end she received only around 7%, so her vote aggregated with Kenyon’s was still well short of Burnham’s.
So for Keir Starmer personally this result was about as bad as it could have been - for all Starmer this morning saying that “voters chose Labour’s campaign of hope and optimism over division and hate”.
Every Makerfield voter knew that Burnham’s motive for running in their constituency was to become an MP with the purpose of launching a coup to replace Starmer as prime minister. That was the “change” he was promising them. They overwhelmingly endorsed him and his ambition to seize the reins of power.
Obviously under our parliamentary system, 25,000 Burnham voters in Wigan have no formal power to turf out Starmer. But they do have the power in practice, because very large numbers of ministers and of Labour MPs think Starmer’s time is up, and Burnham is significantly more popular with Labour members than is Starmer.
There is almost no realistic scenario in which Burnham does not now become Britain’s next prime minister. The question is precisely when, - and whether there is an orderly consensual handover from Starmer to him, or whether Starmer is as good as his word and will insist on fighting Burnham, and probably Wes Streeting too, in a six week leadership contest.
Burnham will give Starmer the weekend at least to take stock, in the hope that a chaotic and divisive contest can be avoided.
Having spent the last few days with Starmer at the G7 in France and having interviewed him about this, I am in no doubt his mood is to fight - partly because, I am told, his erstwhile adviser Morgan McSweeney is telling him Burnham will flake in a contest and that he will win.
If Starmer does choose to fight, it will all get very messy for him very fast. Because he will have to decide whether ministers can publicly endorse Burnham, as they will want to do, and keep their jobs.
If he tells them the price of keeping their jobs is NOT to nominate Burnham, some - maybe many - will resign, and Starmer will preside over a re-run of the mass resignations that destroyed Boris Johnson at the end of his time as prime minister.
Starmer has been repeating that he has faced and overcome political adversity many times since being installed as Labour’s leader six years ago. He’s never faced a challenge quite like this, because no prime minister has.
