Andy Burnham’s stint as health secretary in the final year of Gordon Brown’s government was not especially memorable, although one observation from a senior civil servant in the department at the time has stuck in my mind. Working for Burnham, I was told, felt like “revising for exams with a mate who might turn to you and say: ‘shall we sack this off for a bit and play football instead?’”
It was meant as a compliment, mostly. The secretary of state didn’t defer government business for kickabouts on Whitehall, he just had the vibe of someone who was tempted. That image confirms everything Burnham’s Labour supporters and critics already think about him.
Enthusiasts see serious purpose worn amiably. This, it is said, has been a winning combination in the Greater Manchester mayoralty. Transplanted to Downing Street, it might reconnect the government with audiences it has lost under Keir Starmer. Sceptics say Burnham’s congeniality comes with indecision; that the arc of his political career has been shaped by a preference for being liked over confronting hard choices. This trait can be compatible with municipal office but leads to paralysis and ruin in prime ministers.
The debate is premature given that there isn’t a vacancy in Downing Street. Burnham’s plan to create one, and then fill it, depends on him winning a tricky byelection in Makerfield. But, given the north-western battleground, and the Greater Manchester mayor’s popularity in the region, no other candidate would stand a better chance – or any chance – of keeping the constituency out of Reform UK’s hands.
The fact that the contest is competitive speaks volumes about Labour’s predicament. Makerfield was once a safe seat. Now there is no such thing. The era when power at Westminster was swapped between two dominant English parties according to a swing of voters in a predictable tranche of marginal seats is over. The electoral ground on which Tony Blair’s parliamentary majorities were built has been partitioned. Working-class bastions have been captured by Nigel Farage. Metropolitan centres are turning Green.
The 2024 landslide election win generated a momentary illusion of restored Labour supremacy. Voters were animated by urgency to remove the Tories and sufficiently unthreatened by the prospect of Starmer as prime minister to use his candidacy as the lever for regime change. Once that goal was achieved, there was no public reservoir of loyalty to an ill-defined project under charmless leadership.
Incumbent governments usually shed support midterm. They rely on wavering supporters who have been lodging protest votes in local ballots to come back to the fold in a general election. Something like that might yet be on the cards, but it looks as if something more profound and structural has changed in British politics.
Reform UK voters, whether their old allegiance was to Labour or the Tories, are not just flirting with a different choice. Research published this week as part of the British Social Attitudes survey shows an ideological gulf between Farage’s supporters and the rest of the country. They are less satisfied than the median voter with the state of the economy and public services and they are a class apart when it comes to social resentments. The view that immigrants undermine national culture is held by 75% of Reform UK supporters, compared with 35% of the wider public. Farage’s voters are much more likely to think benefits are too generous and that the whole political system is failing.
John Curtice, the polling expert who co-authored the research, measures the intensity of Reform UK support at “a level of emotional attachment that neither Labour nor the Conservatives have managed to inspire in voters for decades.” That judgment is supported by indications that Reform UK’s strong performance in recent local elections was boosted by differential turnout. A poll commissioned by the independent analyst Sam Freedman found that 75% of 2024 Reform UK voters participated in the 2026 council ballot, compared with 62% for Labour. That enthusiasm gap is wide enough to account for seats changing hands without many voters having to switch parties.
Farage’s seat tally was also boosted by Labour defections to the Greens in places where fragmentation of liberal-left support across multiple parties eases the route for a nationalist challenger. The good news for Burnham in Makerfield is that a tactical anti-Farage coalition looks available. Freedman’s research found that 30% of Green voters in May’s local ballots had considered backing Labour, compared with only 6% of Reform UK supporters.
If Burnham’s re-entry to parliament depends on a progressive bloc vote, many in Labour would take it as proof-of-concept for a general election campaign. The argument is that British politics is no longer a game of capturing swing voters in the centre ground, but a test of who can maximise support on either side of the post-Brexit schism, galvanising one of the cultural tribes that have evolved out of the referendum campaign. The Tories and Reform compete exclusively among legacy leavers, which implies the task for Starmer’s successor would be to assert primacy among former remainers.
There is a counterview held by Labour MPs, especially those with Faragist challengers breathing down their necks. They hear talk of a remain-coded coalition as an all-too-familiar claim by the party’s soft-left that its ideological comfort zone just happens to be the exact place where an election can be won, despite every previous attempt ending in defeat. Their fear is that the new bloc politics analysis, even if it contains some psephological truth, will serve as a pretext to avoid difficult conversations about immigration and welfare reform – and that a government in denial of those challenges has no chance of winning a second term. That concern is compounded by horror at the idea of Labour ever accepting that it no longer carries the banner of natural allegiance in communities that define its history, its lore and its foundational purpose in providing working-class representation.
Many Reform UK voters might be irretrievably lost to Starmer’s party, but Labour has an existential need to believe that a new leader could rekindle the old flame, or at least breathe some air on to the dying embers. Inevitably that hope tends to focus on personality more than policy. It is easier to imagine Burnham’s blokeish affability as the missing ingredient than it is to describe the platform that would reunite a fractured electoral coalition.
That ambition is important for British democracy. The alternative is to accept that the cultural trench carved by Brexit cannot be bridged by persuasion; that politics is all about stirring irreconcilable passions and fears on either side of a polarised public realm. Labour is suffering badly for its failure to straddle the great divide but, to its credit, it is also the only party that looks interested in even trying.
