Burnham Beats Reform: Britain’s Next Prime Minister?

**Alastair Campbell** (0:01)
Labour have won the crucial by-election in Makerfield, and they have won it big. Nearly 25,000 votes for Andy Burnham, 55% of all ballots cast. These are normally words that would delight the leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. But it was in effect Andy Burnham's application to the Labour Party to oust Keir Starmer and put him into Downing Street instead. So does this thumping victory, one in an area where reform battered Labour in the local elections in May, spell the end of the Starmer Premiership? How has it come to this and what happens next? Also, what does the big win for the Tories in Aberdeen South against the SNP mean for the UK and Scottish government's policies on energy? It was quite a night in British politics.

**Rory Stewart** (1:00)
Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:03)
And me, Alastair Campbell. So Rory, Andy Burnham has won, and he has won big.

**Rory Stewart** (1:09)
Amazing. So just to put it in context, this is the by-election in Makerfield, and this was prime reform territory. So two thirds of voters in this constituency had voted for Brexit. And in the local elections very recently, just a few weeks ago, Labour were 20 points behind reform. So reform could have won this seat comfortably. But Andy Burnham has won this with a 20-point lead. He's increased his party vote share by 10 And this is something right against the national trend. So as you, I'm sure, are going to get on to Aberdeen South, as you mentioned, is now Labour went down 19 points, and it went down 18 points in Arborist, but it went 10 points up in this constituency with Andy Burnham.
And he basically wiped out the Greens, the Lib Dems, and the Conservatives. The Greens, the Lib Dems got about 1 percent, Conservatives got about 2 percent. And even Restore and Reform together wouldn't have been enough to beat him. So it's looking very, very strong. There are some caveats around the corner, but pretty strong. Back over to you.

**Alastair Campbell** (2:18)
Yeah. I think a lot of the, when you talk about the two Scottish by-elections, which were caused by former Westminster MPs winning seats in the Holyrood Parliament in the recent Scottish elections, I think a lot of tactical voting going on there and a lot of tactical voting to stop reform in Makerfield. But listen, I was talking to people in the campaign last night and even late on, they were very confident Andy Burnham was going to win, but they were worried that a win might be tainted if Restore votes, the far far right party, ate into reform, the just right, very right wing populist party, and that became a deciding factor. But it wasn't needed because as you say, 55 percent of the vote meant they didn't get near.
Checking a few historical footloose story, you've got to go back to the time when I was one year old, Torrington 1958, Mark Bonham Carter won for the Liberals, for a bigger differential turnout from a general election to a by-election.

**Rory Stewart** (3:14)
What does a differential turnout mean? Sorry.

**Alastair Campbell** (3:16)
The increase in the vote in a by-election, as opposed to the parliamentary election, is normally lower in a by-election. This is considerably higher, so he's driven out people who didn't vote last time around. Then to go back for a rise in the actual numbers, for a by-election candidate standing for the party of government going up on this scale, you've got to go back to Labour, Kevin McNamara, Hull, 1966, a year more remembered for football rather than politics.

**Rory Stewart** (3:45)
The two things you're saying there is that apart from the actual results, the two norms in a by-election are usually, or sometimes fewer people turn out than turn out for a general election, and usually in by-elections there's a tendency to vote against the party of government, so often a protest vote. If you were just running it normally, you would have looked at three things. You would have said, well, it's a by-election, probably anti-government, probably lower turnout, and then you would have looked at the local elections in May, and you would have said, Labour was trailing 20 points behind reform. Remember, of course, in the background is this by-election, Gorton and Dent, which they didn't let Andy Burnham run in, and which Labour lost.
There were a lot of people at times who say, there's nothing to say that if he had run, if the NEC had allowed him to run, he really would have won. I think the evidence, I would suggest, points to the idea that he probably would have won big there too. Back over to you.