From the outset of the Gorton and Denton byelection, Labour strategists were desperate to say the party was on course to win, but the party’s trouncing at the hands of the Greens has made this look laughable in hindsight.
Hollie Ridley, Labour’s general secretary, sent a note to No 10 at the end of January saying it was “clearly a two-horse race” with Reform UK, and only 3% of voters saying they would stick with the Greens.
Later in the contest, cabinet ministers were dispatched to tell journalists things were “looking good” with the data and it was Labour’s biggest ever “get out the vote” operation to ensure victory.
This misplaced optimism was mostly designed to make the voters of Gorton and Denton think that voting Labour was the best chance of defeating Reform UK’s divisive candidate, Matt Goodwin. It was a strategy built after Labour felt burnt by Plaid Cymru winning a Welsh parliament byelection in Caerphilly and it began to position itself as the pre-eminent stop-Reform party.
But the polling and betting markets told a different story – and reporting on the ground also revealed that voters were in no mood to give Labour a hearing.
Time and again voters cited disillusionment with the government’s performance and Labour’s decision to block the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, from standing – even above the overarching chaos of the Peter Mandelson scandal.
Meanwhile, the Greens were playing a blinder. As Labour sought to portray them as “extremists” and “soft on drugs”, Zack Polanski’s party picked Hannah Spencer, a local plumber, as its candidate, and her spirited campaign appeared to send a positive message of hope and change to voters.
Signs of the Green party’s confidence came just four hours after polls opened on Thursday when journalists were given extensive details of Spencer’s victory lap – including mid-afternoon karaoke and marking iftar, the breaking of the fast, at a mosque.
Labour, meanwhile, could only pray for bad weather. “It was raining for hours and now it’s cleared up,” moaned a Labour party councillor at 8pm. They hoped a wet Manchester would drive turnout down and prevent a surge for the Greens and Reform UK.
The first public admission of despondency from Labour came at 10pm as the polls shut. Andrew Western, an MP and the party’s political lead in the campaign, released a statement saying byelections were “always difficult for incumbent governments”, hitting out at the “anger and easy answers” of Reform and the Greens.
In the end, the byelection billed as one of the most unpredictable in years wasn’t even a close call – with Labour coming third behind the Greens and Reform.
By 1am, Labour was conceding defeat. A source said the party had “been able to turn out support in a way they wouldn’t be able to replicate at a general election”. Circling the fringes of the hall where the count took place, a Green party spokesperson said: “My on-the-record response to that is one word: desperate.”
In an arts centre across Manchester, the Greens were already celebrating. Mothin Ali, the party’s deputy leader, was filmed crowd-surfing among jubilant activists three and a half hours before the result was declared.
A Labour aide tried to drum up a round of applause for its candidate, Angeliki Stogia, when she arrived at the count arm in arm with the deputy leader, Lucy Powell, at 3.30am, though by that point it was impossible to disguise the gloom in the camp.
Although Labour and the Greens had traded increasingly bad-tempered barbs, many in Starmer’s party had been quietly impressed by the Greens’ campaign – in particular their focus on “Hannah the plumber”, the relatable 34-year-old tradeswoman candidate.
It had been almost impossible to avoid Spencer’s face in Gorton and Denton for the past four weeks. On billboards, social media and on the streets, she was everywhere – and still found time to fit in a day a week at college for her plastering course.
“It was ridiculous to claim the Greens were extremists when their candidate appeared to be a normal and likable person. It made us look like even we didn’t believe what we were saying,” said one Labour MP, who disliked having to parrot attack lines about the Greens, pitching them as being as bad as Reform.
That did not stop Starmer repeating those same talking points that had proved ineffective about the Greens wanting to weaken Nato and drug laws. When he appeared on television mid-morning, his clip infuriated Labour MPs still further by seeming to be tone deaf.
One MP said Starmer “isn’t even close to getting it, unfortunately”, while another said No 10 had not quite grappled with “just how unpopular we are: our own people hate us”.
Reform, meanwhile, was claiming the byelection was always a tough fight in such a mixed area that combined progressive students with traditional white working-class voters and a sizeable Muslim population. In light of that, the party’s choice of candidate seemed to have been a mistake, after it picked Goodwin, an academic who refused to disown his claim that UK-born people from minority ethnic backgrounds were not necessarily British.
Goodwin arrived at the count at 3.50am and in a brief huddle told journalists: “I think that what you’ve seen is the emergence of a dangerous sectarianism in British politics.
“The Greens are riding a very dangerous wave,” he said. “I’m very concerned about the direction of the country, and I think many people are going to be watching this byelection and they’re going to be feeling the same things that I am, which is deep concern about where Britain is heading.”
Nigel Farage’s party also wasted no time in claiming the election was affected by “family voting” – where more than one person enters a voting booth, raising the risk of votes being influenced by pressure – after observers raised concerns that this appeared to be happening more than usual. They swiftly reported “electoral fraud”, saying it raised “serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas”.
Labour strategists are now left wondering how they will repair their fragmented coalition when votes are haemorraghing on the left in seats such as Gorton, and on the right in areas such as Runcorn where Reform was victorious last year.
MPs were also taking different messages from the results, with some wanting a swing to the left and a “more Labour” approach, plus a change of leader to Burnham or Angela Rayner. Mainstream Group, which is supportive of Burnham, said it wanted to see a “fundamental reset”, while Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the leftwing union Unite, had a blunt piece of advice: “Stop listening to your rich mates and start listening to everyday people.”
Others were quick to say the problem was not switching left or right, but lack of action at dealing with the cost of living and promoting growth. Chris Curtis, a Labour MP from the party’s “growth group”, said the result was a “wake-up call that we as a party need to hear” and there was a broken system that rewarded “the people gaming it and punishes the people grafting”.
One former No 10 aide said Labour still needed to look at the big picture of a national election, where it would be easier for Starmer to position his party as the only force to stop Reform – in contrast to a byelection where the stakes were lower. He said: “Overall, Gorton and Caerphilly have proved there is a big constituency of people who want to prevent Farage gaining power at all costs.”
But another former Labour communications chief said it would be foolish to take any heart from the result: “Reform will weaponise all the divisions and only benefit from splits on the left. It’s nothing but grim.”
