Burnham’s momentum builds in Makerfield as byelection nears

For a few short weeks, the centre of political gravity in Britain has shifted from the Palace of Westminster to the bar of a former Labour club in Wigan.

In London, even as Keir Starmer insists he will fight to stay in No 10, the walls seem to be crumbling around him, especially with Thursday’s resignation of the defence secretary, John Healey.

Two hundred miles north, most mornings outside Stubshaw Cross community centre there is a queue snaking round the building as 20 MPs patiently wait to clock in to do their hours on the doorstep for Andy Burnham in Makerfield.

It is a seat that once looked so impossible to win that some of Burnham’s closest friends advised him to turn down the offer from Josh Simons to fight it. But now, if the polls are to be believed, Burnham looks on the brink of proving his own concept, that he is the only Labour party politician who can stand a chance at beating Reform UK.

One MP said observing their colleagues make the pilgrimage to Ashton-in-Makerfield felt “like watching power change hands in a pub garden”: a few loyalist MPs looking at their shoes on the outskirts of the throng, while their colleagues eagerly sought praise from Burnham’s most influential fixers, Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley.

Inside, MPs are pocketing souvenir stacks of beer mats printed with the ubiquitous Stanley Chow cartoon of Burnham, with the slogan “Brewed Round Here”. Standing in packs outside with activists, they are briefed to tell undecided voters on the doorsteps of Ashton-in-Makerfield and Orrell that they are from “Andy Burnham’s campaign” rather than the Labour party.

Over the next week, the party will target roughly 16% of undecided voters who have told canvassers they are still to make up their minds between Labour and Reform, though strategists say the number has narrowed since the BBC’s Question Time last week.

At the weekend, 450 volunteers came to canvass. By the end of the coming week, Labour activists will have knocked on every door in the constituency five times over.

Residents of Makerfield – though no one would ever call this area that name – know they are the centre of the universe during this bizarre period. As the canvassers make their way along the roads, many of them want to engage in long chats about national issues.

They want to talk about immigration, tax and transport, as well as local flooding, housing, antisocial behaviour, vacant shops and the future of local services. Some are unimpressed by Burnham’s unabashed sights on No 10, but for others that is the basis of his appeal.

There is no Labour attack literature against Reform, or against Restore Britain, which is also making significant inroads here. Instead, almost all the MPs who come to canvass for Burnham agree with the residents they speak to that change is desperately needed. During four hours on the doorsteps, no voter had a good word to say about Starmer, though many struggled to articulate exactly why.

Among the MPs out on a daily basis are members of the Corbynite socialist campaign group, shoulder to shoulder with ministers and ambitious MPs from the 2024 intake. Such is the desire to be part of this most momentous of byelections, constituency Labour parties are sending busloads of activists and staffers are staying in cabins in local people’s gardens.

There is an open admission of fear about how the party will even manage the number of eager volunteers who will turn up on polling day, without aggravating local voters by pestering them too much.

At the centre of it all, the “boys’ club” who were the power brokers in Starmer’s leadership have been replaced by a formidable band of female operators.

There is Midgley, the MP for Knowsley and a battle-hardened Unite and Labour organiser; Haigh, the ex- transport secretary who has become one of Burnham’s closest confidantes; and Sally Jameson, the Doncaster MP and former prison officer. MPs talk particularly about the influence of Haigh. “She is the oracle and the gatekeeper for Andy,” says one.

Outside on the terrace as they waited to get their canvassing instructions, MPs have begun to talk about the result and Burnham’s subsequent return to Westminster as a foregone conclusion. Talk has turned to whether Burnham will challenge Starmer – and the feeling is he will.

But those at the heart of the ground campaign are hesitant to look beyond next Thursday. They are wary of the habitual non-voters who turned out in significant numbers to vote for Reform in the local elections, in which the party swept all the wards.

The Reform campaign made a huge effort to establish a visual presence early. Boards went up along all the major roads within hours of the announcement – faster than the Labour campaign could get theirs to the printers.

The result is a dominant turquoise presence along many of the major arteries, though there are competing navy boards of Restore on many of the streets. On one digital board, the bright hoarding alternates unnervingly between Restore and Burnham’s “For Us” slogan.

Labour canvassers say they believe Rupert Lowe’s Restore could end up with more than 10% of the vote. Several Restore voters who spoke to the Guardian said, rather counterintuitively, they believed Lowe to be less extreme in his views than Farage and cited not his hardline immigration policies, but his position on animal welfare and on allowing children out of school to go on holiday.

But others are clearly attracted by his far more radical remigration and pro-death penalty policies, which have enormous reach on Facebook. The area has a historically significant far-right vote, including about 7% for the British National party as recently as 2010.

While Restore may ultimately help Burnham win the seat, it poses a not insignificant threat to Burnham’s legitimacy among his sceptics. There are already murmurs among MPs saying that if the split on the right is the reason for his victory, it would cast doubt on his narrative.

But that is a problem for a week’s time. Until election day, Haigh and Midgley say they aim to get Burnham physically in front of as many of the 13,000 undecided voters as possible. On Tuesday he gathered more than 100 at a town hall meeting for a three-hour session of questions.

“He is our best electoral asset and people are genuinely quite shocked when he turns up to see them in person,” one campaign source said. “‘They are starting to feel it’s worth one more roll of the dice.

“The message is not anti-Reform, the message is he is coming back to Westminster to change Labour. We want to be hopeful about the country again and put working people back at the heart of our economy.”