Makerfield Is No Coronation: Andy Burnham’s Road to Power Runs Through Labour’s Broken Machine
by Jaffa Levy
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Andy Burnham’s proposed return to Westminster is being treated as the beginning of Labour’s succession drama. Makerfield is more severe than that. It is a northern Labour seat where Reform is already the direct challenger, Labour’s post-Corbyn machinery is exposed, Gaza politics can cut into the left flank, and Burnham’s Greater Manchester record will be tested under national pressure.
Makerfield belongs to the country Labour once assumed it understood: northern, post-industrial, familiar with managed decline, sceptical of Westminster’s habits and increasingly unwilling to accept party loyalty as proof of representation. It is Labour-held territory, but not Labour property.
Burnham enters that landscape with two biographies. For Labour’s alienated working class he is a former Blair Cabinet minister seeking a return to the Commons through a vacancy created by a Labour MP closely associated with the party’s middle class pro Starmer post-Corbyn architecture. That tension is the centre of this story.
His public image has force because it is attached to visible things. The Covid confrontation with Westminster. The “King of the North” mythology. The Bee Network. Buses, fares, public control, local delivery. That gives Burnham something national Labour often lacks: a tangible claim to state capacity.
A by-election is less forgiving. It strips atmosphere into votes, opponents, turnout, grievance and local suspicion.
Labour’s Old Argument Has Returned
The anti-Starmer left will see Makerfield as more than a by-election. It is an opportunity to reopen the argument Labour believed it had settled.
In 2019, Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to a defeat in seats, winning 202 seats and 32.1 per cent of the vote. Labour still won more than ten million votes. In 2024, Starmer won 411 seats and a large Commons majority, but Labour’s popular vote was 9,708,716, with 33.7 per cent of the vote.
The comparison must be handled cleanly. Starmer won power. Corbyn did not. But vote totals still reveal Corbyn’s greater vote share as a result of his depth, enthusiasm and social reach. Starmer’s landslide with less vote share rested heavily on Conservative collapse, Reform fragmentation, tactical voting and the disproportions of first past the post.
For Labour’s left, the old grievance remains alive. Corbynism was defeated in the name of electability and media opposition towards his politics . Starmerism won office, but without a thick popular mandate. Now the party that claimed to have restored seriousness may need Burnham to repair the bond with Corbyn supporters that discipline alone could not secure.
That is a defendable seat, not a sealed one. Reform begins from second place. The Conservative vote can leak further. The Green and anti-war vote does not need to be large to complicate Labour’s margin. Burnham’s name recognition may lift Labour. It may also make the by-election a national test that every opponent has an incentive to weaponise.
The electoral baseline
Makerfield in 2024 was Labour-held but Reform-pressured: Labour 18,202; Reform UK 12,803; Conservatives 4,379; Liberal Democrats 2,735; Greens 1,776. The Labour majority over Reform was 5,399.
Burnham cannot inherit that majority as a personal asset. He must create his own mandate in a by-election where Reform, the Greens, anti-war voters and Conservative defectors all have strategic value.
The consequences are clear. A commanding win would make Burnham the Labour figure who stopped Reform on northern ground. A narrow win would get him into Parliament but weaken the aura. A defeat would end the leadership project before it reached Westminster.
The Vacancy Gives Reform Its First Line of Attack
Reform does not need a sophisticated argument. It needs to make the arrangement look managed. A Labour MP elected in 2024 stands aside. A mayor is brought in. A constituency is asked to provide the parliamentary address for a leadership operation.
That charge will be simple: Makerfield is being used as a stage in Labour’s internal reorganisation. Whether that is fair is not the only question. In a by-election, plausibility is often enough to start damage.
Burnham’s strength rests on distance from Westminster. He is the mayor rather than the minister, the city-region politician rather than the London manager, the man of buses rather than briefings. Yet his return to Parliament depends on cooperation from within Labour’s governing order. That does not prove improper coordination. It does give opponents a frame: the anti-machine candidate arriving through a machine-made vacancy.
Simons Makes the Route Politically Exposed
Josh Simons is not an ordinary departing backbencher. He is a former director of Labour Together, the network associated with the post-Corbyn Starmer project. He rose quickly after entering Parliament, became a ministerial aide and then a Cabinet Office minister, before resigning in February after controversy over Labour Together commissioning APCO to examine journalists reporting on the group’s funding.
For Burnham’s supporters, Simons’ resignation is a sign that Labour recognises the scale of the crisis and is clearing space for the only figure with sufficient northern reach. For critics, the same facts will suggest something less heroic: a vacancy created from inside the architecture Burnham is supposed to transcend.
Josh Simons, Labour Together and the vacancy
The established facts are these: Simons was director of Labour Together; Labour Together was central to the post-Corbyn Starmer project; Simons later won Makerfield; he is now vacating the seat so Burnham can attempt to return to Parliament.
Telegraph.com has already examined this machinery. In Labour Together and the Hollowing of Labour, the argument was that Labour Together should be understood not merely as a think-tank, but as organisational infrastructure: donor networks, polling, data capacity, message discipline and personnel continuity linking opposition to government. A related Telegraph.com article, How Labour Together Influenced the Labour Party, traced the group’s rise after Corbyn, its role under Morgan McSweeney, and its place in preparing the ground for Starmerism.
The question of motive is more speculative. The generous reading is that Simons believes Labour faces such danger that he is willing to give up his seat for the politician most likely to reconnect the party with voters. The colder political reading, which should be treated as interpretation rather than proven fact, is managed transition: a figure from the Starmerite infrastructure opening a controlled route for a successor before events impose one more brutally.
The evidence does not allow a definitive conclusion about motive. The political effect is easier to identify. Burnham’s outsider image is being routed through Labour’s insider apparatus, and opponents will use that contradiction.
The factional bill Labour thought it had settled
Starmer’s critics on the left in these elections may argue that Labour Together and the post-Corbyn Labour machine helped defeat and marginalise Corbynism, only to produce a government with a huge parliamentary majority but a thinner popular mandate than the one Corbyn took into defeat.
That does not prove the whole anti-Starmer narrative. Starmer won power and Corbyn lost. But the arithmetic explains why Makerfield could become a symbolic revenge contest for voters who believe Labour’s anti Corbyn internal machine won the party while losing emotional contact with parts of the public.
The Labour Vote May Not Move as One Bloc
Burnham’s task is not confined to defeating Reform. He must stop Labour’s old coalition from breaking into separate protest channels.
The Greens will use a different route into the contest. Burnham’s public-control language helps him with voters who want a more interventionist state, but it does not fully protect him from criticism over clean air, climate ambition, housing, public ownership, Gaza and civil liberties. The likely Green and left argument is that Burnham speaks the language of insurgency while governing through compromise and containment.
That may not make the Greens the principal threat or any challange to the more popular Reform. Here Reform begins from second place, leakage from Labour’s left flank can matter even if it does not produce a Green breakthrough.
George Galloway’s political space presents a separate risk. The relevant vehicle is not Respect, his earlier party, but the Workers Party of Britain and candidates appealing to the same anti-war, pro-Palestinian and anti-Starmer electorate. The Workers Party contested 152 seats in the 2024 general election and won more than 210,000 votes nationally.
There is also a street-politics atmosphere around some of the issues likely to enter the campaign. Grooming gangs, policing, migration and institutional failure have been used by Tommy Robinson-aligned activists and protest networks to mobilise anger outside ordinary party structures. Burnham does not need to be the object of that entire movement for it to affect the climate of the contest. Reform and the wider populist right can benefit from the same emotional territory without formally owning every protest or every slogan attached to it.
In Makerfield, none of these forces needs to defeat Burnham alone. Their strategic value lies in preventing a clean victory.
The fragmentation field
Reform is the direct and strong challenger. The Greens can cut into Labour’s moral-left vote. Workers Party or Galloway-aligned politics can appeal to anti-war and pro-Palestinian voters. Tommy Robinson-aligned street politics can intensify the atmosphere around grooming gangs, policing and institutional failure, even where it does not appear on the ballot paper.
This is why the by-election is difficult for Burnham. He does not merely need to top the poll. He needs to win in a way that looks like authority rather than survival.
A narrow win would still return him to Parliament, but it would weaken the claim that he can rescue Labour nationally. The leadership project requires more than entry. It requires proof of force.
Grooming Gangs Are the Most Combustible Vulnerability
The most emotionally dangerous line of attack lies inside the Greater Manchester story itself.
It would be surprising if Reform did not raise grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation. The issue concerns children, police, councils, institutional failure, public trust and the suspicion that official systems protected themselves for too long. Any politician connected with local authority or policing structures in the region is vulnerable to being drawn into that argument.
Burnham has an answer. He commissioned local reviews, exposed failures and has supported a limited national inquiry with stronger powers. His opponents are likely to say that this does not go far enough. They will seek to frame the matter not as a technical disagreement about inquiry design, but as a test of whether Labour-run institutions acted with sufficient urgency and transparency when vulnerable girls required protection.
That gives Burnham a serious defence. It also leaves a political question available to opponents: if the local powers were not strong enough, why was the case for a statutory process not pressed harder and earlier?
That question does not require a finding of personal misconduct. Its force is political rather than criminal or quasi-judicial. It asks whether Burnham, as the dominant Labour figure in Greater Manchester and the holder of strategic police and crime functions through the mayoralty, applied enough pressure soon enough to force the full truth into the open. The answer may be contested. The vulnerability is real.
The grooming-gangs vulnerability
Child sexual exploitation and grooming gangs in Greater Manchester are not peripheral to northern politics. Rochdale and Oldham sit inside the wider Greater Manchester story, and the issue has become a national test of whether police, councils and political institutions protected vulnerable girls with sufficient urgency and transparency.
Burnham’s defence is that he commissioned local reviews and has since supported a limited national inquiry, arguing that local reviews lacked statutory powers to compel evidence. That distinction matters. A mayoral review is not the same as a public inquiry with coercive powers.
Critics are likely to say the reviews were too limited, too slow and too dependent on voluntary cooperation from institutions whose conduct was under scrutiny. Reform does not need to prove that Burnham personally caused the failures. Its attack can be simpler: he was Greater Manchester mayor, he held strategic police and crime functions through the mayoralty, and many voters still do not believe the whole truth has been forced into the open.
The issue cuts directly against Burnham’s strongest asset: trust. His campaign depends on the image of a mayor who stands up for ordinary people against remote institutions. Grooming gangs allow opponents to ask whether, on one of the most painful failures of local authority and police leadership in northern England, he stood up hard enough, early enough and with enough coercive force.
Burnham’s Older Record Gives the Left Material
Yet Burnham’s opponents do not have to invent a past. They can read one.
TheyWorkForYou records Burnham as having consistently voted for the Iraq War and consistently voted against investigations into it. Most Makerfield voters will not vote on Iraq, but the record complicates the image of Burnham as a clean break with the old Labour establishment. He served in New Labour governments. He voted for one of the defining foreign-policy decisions of that era.
He has also faced criticism from the left over NHS marketisation and over decisions taken in the period before Hinchingbrooke became the first NHS hospital managed by a private company, while disputing crude claims that he personally “privatised” the hospital.
On Israel and Palestine, critics are already circulating older political positions: association with Labour Friends of Israel, opposition to BDS, praise for Israel as a democracy and past language around the Balfour Declaration. Identity and religious affiliation are not evidence of political wrongdoing. The defensible political point is narrower: for pro-Palestinian and anti-Starmer voters, Burnham’s older Israel-related positions may look like continuity with the Labour establishment rather than rupture from it.
None of this necessarily destroys Burnham. Political careers contain periods, compromises and reversals. The question is whether opponents can make the older record visible enough to puncture the simplicity of the newer persona.
The Strategic Consequence
Burnham is Labour’s most plausible answer because he carries the party’s contradictions better than anyone else. He stands outside Westminster but now needs Westminster. He speaks against Starmerism but enters through a vacancy created by a figure associated with Labour Together. He was a Blairite. He offers public control but carries New Labour history. He speaks for northern voters but must prove he can beat Reform in a Labour seat where Reform is already second.
The leadership gossip has treated this as momentum. It looks more like exposure.
Even some Labour insiders appear to understand the danger. Luke Akehurst, Labour MP for North Durham and a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, has described the Makerfield by-election as “very, very difficult” even with a high-profile candidate.
Makerfield contains the crisis in compressed form: Starmer’s thin mandate, Labour Together’s machinery, Reform’s advance, the Green and Gaza fracture, the Galloway spoiler risk, the grooming-gangs vulnerability, and the unresolved question of whether Burnham is a break with the old order or simply its most effective rebranding.
Burnham may still be Labour’s best available route out of the Starmer collapse. Makerfield is not the safe passage. It is the test.
