The Labor mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham was handily elected as an MP on Friday June 19 during a parliamentary by-election, an electoral victory which puts him in pole position to succeed Keir Starmer as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
With 54.8% of the vote, more than 9,000 votes ahead, Andy Burnham, 56, former minister under Gordon Brown and mayor of Manchester since 2017, largely beat Robert Kenyon (34.5%), candidate for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform party, in the Makerfield constituency near Manchester (north-west).
Reform, which has led the national polls for months and won local elections in this region at the beginning of May, thus suffered a major setback. It suffered from competition from a new party, Restore Britain, even more to the extreme right, whose candidate Rebecca Shepherd came third with 6.8% of the vote, far ahead of the Conservative candidate (2.2%).
“I say it to my own party: this is one last chance to change,” said Andy Burnham when the results were announced in Wigan, where the counting of the vote took place marked by a strong participation, worthy of its national challenge. “Everyone knows that politics is not working, everyone can sense that the country is not currently where it should be. Tonight could mark a turning point,” he added to the applause of his supporters.
“King of the North”
Although he is the most popular Labor leader according to the YouGov institute, Andy Burnham, nicknamed the “King of the North” and already an unsuccessful candidate for leader of Labor in 2010 and 2015, could not claim to lead the party and become Prime Minister without first finding a seat as an MP.
According to analysts, he was able to win this crucial election by “playing on both sides”: attracting both traditional Labor voters and those who want to see Keir Starmer removed from power, as well as thanks to a mobilization of the electorate worried about the rise of the far right, embodied by Reform and Restore.
The one who advocates a more left-wing policy for Labor now appears ideally placed to oust Keir Starmer, very unpopular and contested for months within the party – and even more so since the resignation last week of its defense minister and its secretary of state for the armed forces.
A slayer of “neoliberalism”, Andy Burnham notably displays his desire to revitalize regions in difficulty, like the renewal he embodied in Manchester, a former industrial bastion. To reassure worried markets, he nevertheless committed to meeting the balanced budget objectives set by the current Minister of Finance, Rachel Reeves.
Beyond his inauguration as an MP expected on Monday, the way in which he now intends to challenge Keir Starmer is however uncertain, and British media such as the Times and the Guardian were speculating on several possible scenarios.
