A Very British Special By-Election – Makerfield 2026
Hi everyone,
In a gritty district made famous by George Orwell, fewer than 25 thousand Brits chose Andy Burnham as their new Member of Parliament – and the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to replace Keir Starmer.
On Monday, 22nd of June in London, Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stood in front of No. 10 Downing Street, announcing that he was resigning effective as soon as the new Labour leader and UK PM was chosen.
Starmer led Labour to a smashing victory in July 2024 over the incumbent Conservative government. Even after subsequent losses, he and his party hold 403 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons.
The proximate event that triggered Starmer to “consider his position” over the weekend, then led him to walk the plank on Monday, was the election the previous Thursday 18 June, of Andy Burham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, as the new Member of Parliament for Makerfield.
The Makerfield constituency is a gritty slice of North-West England, a post-industrial landscape wedge between Liverpool and Manchester, dotted with defunct coal mines and inhabited mostly by traditional White working-class voters. There are limited numbers of immigrants, students, college-educated, and higher-income residents.
Until recently Makerfield had been a Labour Party electoral stronghold for over a century – a brick in Labour’s “Red Wall” of seats with similar demographics and politics stretching across Northern England and the Midlands. As in the rest of the Red Wall, support for Labour has been in decline, though not to the point of actually losing this seat.
This year, the sitting Labour MP elected in 2024 decided to hang it up, for the express purpose of letting Andy Burnham run and get elected. Not just as Makerfield’s new Member of Parliament, but as prime challenger to Keir Starmer as Labour’s leader and the UK’s next Prime Minister.
Andy Burnham was first elected to Parliament in 2001 and served in Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. After Brown and Labour were defeated in 2010, Burnham ran twice for party leadership but lost, last time to leftwinger Jeremy Corbin. While Labour was losing 2017 and 2019 general elections, he won election as Mayor of Greater Manchester (2026 population 3 million) by over 60% and was reelected by similar landslide.
Dubbed “King of the North” by press and public, Andy Burnham is well-regarded and reasonably popular, especially in Greater Manchester.
The slow-motion deflation of Keir Starmer has spurred speculation as to possible replacements within upper ranks of Labour. Burham’s name had not just been coming up; he was polling among the best with party faithful and general public, certainly better than Starmer. However, under Labour party rules, Burnham was ineligible to launch a challenge to Keir or even run for party leader at all, because he was NOT a Member of Parliament.
Until last week…
Makerfield 2026 By-Election Results
The total population of Makerfield parliamentary constituency is about 105,000, of whom over 77,000 are registered voters. Thursday 18 June 2026 by-election voter turnout was 45,476 or 58.7% of registration – higher by more than five thousand (+6.1%) than in the 2024 general election.
Voter polling stations closed at 10 pm UK time, and the hand counting process began; results were officially declared just after 3am Friday morning, with all 14 candidates lined up on stage to hear the official results. Some dressed in outrageous over-the-top costumes. (For example, Andy Burnham as black-dressed proletarian hipster).
Starting at the bottom (so to speak) and working our way up…
COUNT BINFACE & SEVEN OTHER OTHERS = 274 votes 0.6% (- 0.3% GE24)
As is customary for Great British Elections, the Makerfield declaration of by-election results featured lineup of 14 candidates, with winner Andy Burnham flanked to the left by a Fox wielding sign “Save British Wildlife” (18 votes) and to the right by Count Binface (95 votes) with campaigning for visionary proposals including wifi on trains that works, also trains that work, and requiring cyclist who violate traffic code to ride unicycles. Also in the also-ran running: Howling Laud Hope, the very old-school-loony leader of the Official Raving Monster Loony Party (45 votes).
And still the greatest: running (and losing) 28 elections over 35 years. Boaks was an indefatigable campaigner for road safety (for pedestrians) who anticipated the current trend, by running in one by-election as “British White Resident.” Yet another famous loony was Screaming Lord Sutch (musician precursor to Ozzy Osbourne) who in 1966 challenged Harold Wilson in the then-prime minister’s own constituency, and went on to found a beloved British institution: the Official Raving Monster Loony Party. Sutch’s successor as ORMLP leader, Howling Laud Hope (neither being real Peers of the Realm) captured the old-school loony vote (45 votes) in Makerfield.
LIBERAL DEMOCRAT = 163 VOTES 0.4% (-6.4% VS GE 2024)
Left-of-center heirs to the old Liberal Party of Gladstone and Lloyd George, the Lib Dem vote in Makerfield, was squeezed to the vanishing point – switching to Andy Burnham’s Labour Party in order to block Reform in general and Nigel Farage – founder of the previous Brexit Party – in particular.
GREEN PARTY. = 308 VOTES 0.6% (-3.7% VESUS GE 2024)
Progressive left Green Party vote held up only slightly better than Lib Dems, likely because many are critical of Labour on issues ranging from the environment, immigration, and Gaza. Yet most Green voters clearly decamped to Burnham’s big tent.
CONSERVATIVE = 997 2.2% (-8.7 VESUS GE 2024)
Back in the 2019 post-Brexit general election (aka The Boris Bounce) – won handily by incumbent Tory PM Boris Johnson, the Conservative vote in the Labour stronghold of Makerfield was a respectable 34% compared with 42.4% nationally across the UK. But in 2024, driven into third place by Reform, the local Conservatives garnered just 10.9% . . . and lost most of that last Thursday. So the traditional Tory vote also got squeezed, while some shifted to Reform or Restore, or skipped the vote, others joined the swing to Labour, or following reasons:
They liked and voted for Andy Burnham on his record as Greater Manchester Mayor.
They voted AGAINST Nigel Farage & Reform as a menace to Britain & Conservative Party.
They voted AGAINST Keir Starmer by voting VERY tactically for Andy Burnham.
Across the UK, Conservatives led by Kemi Badenoch have continued to hemorrhage support to Reform like they did in 2024 and most subsequent elections – most notably in May 2026 local elections; same as Keir Starmer’s Labour since then. However, the same day the Tory vote evaporated in Makerfield, it surged at another by-election up in Scotland, to fill vacancy when sitting UK MP Steven Flynn, Scottish National Party leader, was elected to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh as an SNP MSP.
Conservatives took Aberdeen South from the SNP due mainly to tactical voting against SNP’s policies to limit oil & gas, Aberdeen being the major jump-off point for nearby North Sea off-shore fields. In yet another Scotland by-election, for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry the SNP held the seat with increased vote, despite former party treasurer and estranged husband of former SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon pleading guilty to embezzling over half a million dollars US in party funds.
RESTORE = 3,111 votes 6.4% (new party post-GE 2024)
This even further to the right breakaway movement was founded by multi-millionaire and former-Reform MP Rupert Lowe. Backed by a barrage of Elon Musk tweets, for the obvious purpose of frustrating Farage, Restore also fielded a local businesswoman who doubtless appealed to many right-wingish women turned off by the Reform candidate’s online misogyny and outright obscenity. However, what beat back Farage & Co. in Makerfield was NOT Restore’s 3rd place showing, but rather Labour’s near 55% absolute majority for Andy Burnham.
REFORM = 15.696 34.5% (+2.7% versus GE 2024)
In July 2024, the new Reform Party won close to a third of all votes cast in Makerfield, passing the Conservative by garnering three-quarters of the right-of-center vote. In the nearly two years since, Reform has been riding high in the polls leading Labour by upwards of +10% and more. And just weeks ago, in May 2026 local elections, Reform captured just over 50% of the vote, mostly at the expense of Labour whose vote share slumped to under 25% in turf they’d dominated since George Orwell was a little boy. The rise of Reform at the expense of Labour AND Conservatives has been despite the party and its leader having generated considerable negative media, and while Farage (like his mentor Trump) famously believes there is no such thing as bad publicity, there truly is a limit to just how much bad is good in this context. Allegations include Farage trousering an undisclosed £5 million donation; unqualified, ineffective, inattentive elected MPs and local officials; ramping up street violence against immigrants; and piss-poor vetting of the social- media spewings of Reform candidates. Most especially their Makenfield standardbearer, a local plumber who exacerbated his epic online misogyny by posting obscene fantasies of sexually abusing a female broadcast journalist. She responded by calling him out as a ‘cowardly man.” Even Nigel Farage noted In his immediate by-election post-mortem, that this was very unhelpful.
LABOUR = 24,924 54.8% (+9.3% versus GE 2024)
Three decades ago, when Tony Blair first led “New Labour” to national victory in 1997, his candidate in Makerfield won with 73.9%. Over the next 20 years Labour won every election but with lesser shares: GE01 68.5%; GE05 63.2%; GE10 47.3%; GE 2015 51.8%; GE 2017 60.1%; GE 2019 45.1%; GE 2024 45.2%. And just last month, in May 2026 local elections, half of the 2024 vote share vanished, leaving Labour with just 22% of the Makerfield votes cast for local councils.
This is hardly surprising given that Starmer’s Labour has been trailing in virtually every published opinion poll since Spring 2025, with UK support hovering around 20% or less (on par with Badenoch’s Conservatives) compared to about 30% or better for Reform.
The scale of Burnham’s achievement in reversing the trend and winning back an absolute majority in Makerfield, was underlined the same day by by-election results in Scotland where Labour’s vote plummeted compared with 2024: in Aberdeen South by – 19.4%; in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry by – 18.1%.
If Andy Burnham had lost last week in Makerfield, his challenge versus Starmer would have been over before it began, though Keir would NOT be out of the woods.
If the Mayor had squeaked out a narrow victory over Reform, it would be game on at Westminster, but hardly a slam dunk let alone a sure thing for Andy.
The fact that he won by an absolute majority in a landslide over Reform was what made Keir Starmer’s resignation inevitable, and Andy Burham’s ascent.
On to the next!
Mike