An Orderly Succession
On a plumber, a mayor, and the keys to Downing Street
The week after May 7th was the closest Labour has come to collapsing in on itself since winning the 2024 general election. Reform swept the English councils. Wales polled Labour third. The Greens took London boroughs.
The markets had priced in the shock, but the political consequences were still drastic.
Within days, 95 Labour MPs had signed letters calling on Starmer to resign or set out a timetable for departure. 103 others signed a counter-letter saying now was “no time for a leadership contest.” According to LabourList’s running tracker, 159 MPs support Starmer, 97 want him gone, and 147 have taken no public position.
Markets give 20% odds Starmer exits before July, but 72% he exits in 2026.
Keir Starmer went on a round of regional TV interviews, compared Andy Burnham’s economic proposals to Liz Truss, said he would “lead from the front,” and is still in Downing Street. The comparison perhaps tells us more about the attacker’s anxieties than the target’s economics: Burnham’s prospectus involves devolution and place-based investment, which is alot of things, but meaningfully isn’t a Truss-adjacent position. The comparison was likely designed to trigger bond market anxiety about a potential leadership contests, markets, which, as opposed to the court of public opinion, have been relatively favourable to Starmer and Reeves.
Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary on May 14th. His letter:
“Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.”
He had, according to a source close to him, the numbers to trigger a formal contest. He decided not to. The stated reason was an “orderly timetable.” I find this hard to take at face value, because there is no orderly timetable: there is Makerfield on June 18th, and whatever comes after it. The more plausible explanation is straightforward: triggering a contest now means fighting it against a candidate who isn’t in parliament yet and losing to Andy Burnham before Burnham has taken a single Commons vote would be a career-defining outcome, and not in a good way. Waiting on the other hand, costs little-to-nothing and keeps options open. Every Labour rival seems to have reached a similar calculation, which is perhaps the only reason Starmer still sits in Number 10.
Markets give Streeting a 13% chance of being the next Labour leader post-Starmer.
YouGov’s poll of Labour members is a good reflection on the situation, although nuanced. 66% of Labour members think Starmer has done a good job as Prime Minister. 57% think Streeting was wrong to resign. And yet 61% want Starmer to stand down before the next election, only 28% think Labour would win in 2029 with him as leader, and 47% rank Burnham as their first preference. To be fair to the man, members do think he’s governing competently. However, they have also concluded that this doesn’t really matter. The party famous for treating electibility as the highest pedestal for candidacy has reached the conclusion that it’s current leader, regardless of performing fairly reasonably, is an electoral liability significant enough to justify the disruption of replacing him midterm.
Streeting would lose to Starmer among members by 65% to 15%, which is a difficult number to build a leadership campaign around. He has since committed to rejoining the EU, staking out the exact position Burnham just walked back (more on this later).
Josh Simons resigned as MP for Makerfield on the same day as Streeting, explicitly stating that this was with the intention to create a path for Burnham to return to Westminster. Simons had himself resigned from ministerial positions in February after a scandal involving the investigation of journalists who had published unfavourable coverage of a think tank he ran, linked falsely to pro-Russian propaganda. His resignation statement said he was “putting the people I represent and the country I love first.”
The NEC, having blocked Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton in January by eight votes to one (Starmer voted against), approved his candidacy on May 15th. Burnham was confirmed as Labour’s candidate on May 19th after no other names were put forward for local selection. He is the first figure to be given a parliamentary seat specifically to mount a leadership challenge since the 1965 Leyton by-election, where the Labour candidate with a similar game-plan lost in a shock victory by 205 votes. Whether that is a comforting or uncomfortable precedent is dependent.
Steve Richards on Newsnight called it “the most significant by-election in post-war British history.” Channel 4 went with “arguably the most important by-election in living memory.”
Keir Starmer has pledged to campaign for Burnham in Makerfield. Burnham, upon hearing this, was reportedly not ecstatic. Guido Fawkes has taken to calling him “Angry Burnham.” The arrangement, with two men publicly campaigning while one is attempting to replace the other, has little obvious precedent. But Kier has had worse weeks.
On paper, Makerfield is not a seat Labour should be competitive in right now. It voted 65% Leave in 2016. The 2021 census puts it well to the right of the national average economically, and considerably further right culturally. At the 2024 general election, Reform took 34%, fifteen points behind Labour, in what was supposed to be a safe seat. At the May 7th council elections, Reform swept all eight Makerfield wards with around 50% of the vote against Labour’s 27%.
John Curtice gives Labour less than 5% chance without Burnham. Survation puts it quite literally at zero. With Burnham, Survation’s most recent poll (fieldwork May 18-22) has Labour on 43%, Reform on 40%, Restore Britain on 7%, Lib Dems on 4%, Greens on 3%, and Conservatives on 2%.
Reform’s candidate is Robert Kenyon: self-employed plumber, born in the constituency, former Army reservist, NHS technician through the pandemic, finished second in 2024 with 31.8%. Nigel Farage has pledged to “throw absolutely everything” at the campaign. The Monster Raving Loony Party is also standing, represented by Howling Laud Hope, a publican from Fleet who has contested more than thirty by-elections and has led the party since the death of Screaming Lord Sutch in 1999.
The Green candidate withdrew after nine hours citing personal reasons, with Caroline Lucas subsequently urging the Greens not to field a replacement, on the grounds that Burnham's support for electoral reform "could transform our democracy." A replacement candidate was announced this week regardless.
Markets currently give Labour 64% and Reform 30%, with Restore at 5% and the Greens at 1.2% following the candidate instability. The Reform number has compressed since the market first opened, falling from around 40% as Burnham’s candidacy became more tangible and the risk of vote-splitting from the Greens reduced.
On a side-tangent here, there is a broader pattern across recent by-elections, where Green and Reform candidates (specifically elected ones) have been withdrawing at a striking rate, often because their campaigns based on foreign policy positions and broader geopolitical goals end up materialising to the reality of the job - bin collection & social care budgets, with the parties on a vicious cycle of replacement. While the flanks are certainty generating a significant amount of energy for British politics, they are learning that governing is a vastly different discipline from campaigning.
To understand why Makerfield matters beyond the question of the immediate leadership challenge, you have to understand the basis of Burnham’s political argument.
His diagnosis of Britain’s political failure is not primarily about Labour or the north. It is about the centralised state. He calls his approach “Manchesterism”: the idea that the last forty years of top-down Westminster policy broke the linkage bridging economic growth and public welfare, and the way to restore that balance is to devolve power and resources to city regions that understand what they govern.
“We need to feel the national state at the back of the local state,”
he told the Institute for Government in January.
“In effect what we find ourselves doing is fighting it all of the time in an attritional battle.”
His critique of HM Treasury is personal: he was a Treasury minister in 2007 when northern rail investment was blocked because it failed the Green Book economic test. The test was designed to evaluate returns in a high-density, high-productivity London economy. The north, obviously, and by design, failed it and the funding went elsewhere..
The Bee Network acts as his proof of concept. Greater Manchester brought its bus services back under local authority control after decades of privatisation. The regulated system now runs a third cheaper per kilometre than its privatised predecessor, with a £2 fare cap. Burnham points to this as evidence that public and local control acts as an essential pre-requisite for growth rather than a reward for it.
His broader programme, outlined at the Cambridge Bennett School in March, involves the same logic but applied nationally: reform HM’s Treasury, devolve housing and skills from national agencies like Homes England and Skills England to local council authorities, replace FPTP with proportional representation, abolish the House of Lords in favour of an elected Senate representing the nations and regions, and remove the whip system from MPs.
Little of this is based on Brexit and immigration. This is vital to understand when approaching Burnhamism.
Makerfield voted 65% Leave. Robert Kenyon, Reform’s candidate, is a local plumber and Army reservist who is also running on the premise that Westminster has failed this community. The difference in both candidates is the diagnosis of that failure. Burnham says the failure was inherently structural: forty years of centralised economic policy that extracted value from places like Makerfield rather than investing in them. Kenyon and Reform say the failure was cultural and demographic: immigration, the erosion of traditional industry and “British identity”, and a political class that stopped speaking the language of the people who built this country. Both men are running against the same Westminster, but has contrary accounts of what exactly its failure was.
At the Labour conference last year, Burnham said he wanted to rejoin the EU within his lifetime. Last week he announced he was “not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU” and that the country should not “rerun those arguments.” Hours later, his team confirmed he would stick with Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules, after financial markets had taken fright at earlier signals he might not. In the New Statesman, Burnham had said: “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets.”
Farage’s “will the real Andy Burnham please stand up” is designed to frame this as incoherence. I think the more interesting reading is that these are two separate capitulations to two separate pressures that have nothing to do with the central argument he is making. The EU reversal is him standing in a 65% Leave seat and deciding that relitigating Brexit is not the ground he wants to fight on. The fiscal rules reversal is him discovering that the markets will move against any Labour leader who signals loose spending, and that governing requires accommodation with that constraint. This is not Manchesterism failing, but rather it encountering the parts of British political reality is might have not been designed to address.
The deeper question, which the Bennett School paper raises and nobody in the current political conversation is really engaging with, is whether Manchesterism can survive contact with Downing Street at all. Blair came into office committed to devolution and ended up with a centralised Sure Start programme run from Whitehall, which came crashing down post-2008. Cameron came into the policy with promised radical localism but delivered a top-down austerity programme administered through local government. The view from Downing Street, as the Bennett School puts it, has a tendency to alter perspectives on central control. Burnham’s entire platform is built on dismantling Westminster orthodoxy. The paradox at the heart of it is that he has to acquire the vast levers of the British state in order to devolve them, and the history books says this is harder than it looks.
If Burnham wins on June 18th, he is required under the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 to resign as Mayor of Greater Manchester, triggering another by-election. He will need 81 MPs to formally trigger a leadership contest. Given the parliamentary arithmetic and the 59% of Labour members who would back him over Starmer in a direct contest, that threshold looks achievable. The contest would be Labour’s first since 2020.
Markets give a 65% chance that Burnham wins the by-election, an astonishing 50% chance that he is PM in 2027, pricing the gap at a mere 15 points.
However, if Burnham loses, the crisis would not only fail to resolve but get intrinsically messier. The 97 MPs who want Starmer gone don’t disappear, the 61% of members who want him out before 2029 will likely not change their minds. What does change, however, is that the most compelling alternative would have been removed, and Labour’s internal crisis would have no obvious solution.
A Reform win in Makerfield would do more than end a candidacy. If Reform can beat the most personally popular Labour politician in the country, running on his home ground, in the seat his party created a by-election specifically to give him, then the 2029 projections of Reform dominance start becoming more tangible.
Either way, Britain is about to have its sixth Prime Minister in ten years, or it isn’t, and the question will be settled by a by-election in Greater Manchester that was triggered specifically because a sitting Prime Minister blocked his most dangerous rival from standing anywhere else.
Happy Forecasting!
- Above the Fold