23AUG

Burnham storms back to win Makerfield

2 min read

19:09UTC

Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with 24,927 votes and a 9,231 majority over Reform, on rising turnout, inverting the usual mid-term penalty for a governing party.

← Back to Reform loses three wards, wins Clacton Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsAssessed

Key takeaway

Burnham beat Reform by 9,231 on rising turnout, outrunning both the 2024 baseline and the polls.

Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election on 18 June with 24,927 votes, a 54.8% share and a majority of 9,231 over Reform UK's Rob Kenyon ¹. Turnout rose to 58.77%.

By-elections normally punish governing parties: turnout falls and the incumbent's share drops. Here both rose. Labour's share climbed from 45% at the 2024 general election, and turnout went up from 52.5%. That lift looks personal to Burnham, whose name recognition a generic Labour candidate could not match.

Reform's own share also rose, to 34.5%, while the Conservatives collapsed to fifth on 2.2%, behind Restore Britain, so the squeeze fell on the Tories rather than Reform. Burnham outran the Survation poll that had put him three points ahead by roughly twenty. The satirical candidate Count Binface took 95 votes.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

A by-election is a special vote to fill a parliamentary seat between general elections. Normally, when the governing party's candidate stands in one, both its vote share and turnout tend to fall compared with the last general election, because voters use the contest to register a protest. In Makerfield on 18 June, the opposite happened. Andy Burnham won with 24,927 votes, 54.8% of the vote, actually up on Labour's 2024 result, and more people turned out to vote than last time. Reform UK's candidate came second but also grew its vote share, while the Conservatives collapsed to fifth place behind Restore Britain. Analysts put this down to Burnham's own personal popularity as Greater Manchester's mayor, separate from how people feel about the Labour government nationally.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Burnham entered the contest already carrying a personal brand built over two elected terms as Greater Manchester mayor, giving him name recognition and a track record independent of the national Labour government he was not yet part of in Parliament.

That kind of split-ticket effect, where voters back a locally popular figure regardless of their party's national standing, is well documented in British Election Study research on personal votes, and explains why Makerfield diverged from the pattern seen in most governing-party by-elections.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Burnham's Makerfield win gave him both a Commons seat and a result strong enough to be read as a personal mandate ahead of the Labour leadership contest.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Batley and Spen in 2021 saw Labour narrowly hold on with a strong local candidate, Kim Leadbeater, against an expected swing away from the governing opposition brand, the same personal-candidate effect overriding a national trend line.

Counter-parallel: Hartlepool in the same year saw the normal penalty apply in full, with Labour losing a seat it had held for decades to the Conservatives, showing that without a strong personal candidate the standard incumbency swing reasserts itself.

Consensus view: British Election Study analysts note that governing-party by-elections mid-term typically see turnout and vote share fall, yet Makerfield saw both rise for Labour, Burnham's vote share up 9.8 points and turnout up 6.27 points on 2024, a personal-vote effect distinct from any national trend.

Counter-view: Electoral Calculus modelling points out that Reform's own vote share also rose, to 34.5%, so the result inverts the seat-level penalty without reversing the underlying national trend; a uniform swing model still shows Labour's national position weakening even as Makerfield itself bucked it.

Key tension: Whether Makerfield shows Labour recovering support or simply shows one exceptionally strong local candidate outperforming a national picture that has not changed.

Sources:Wigan Council

Mentions:Andy Burnham →Robert Kenyon →Makerfield →Restore Britain →Reform UK →Conservative Party →Count Binface →Survation →Electoral Calculus →Labour Party →

First Reported In

Update #11 · Farage to quit Clacton to force by-election

Wigan Council· 8 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Labour NEC clears Burnham for Makerfield run

NEC approval of Burnham's Makerfield candidacy set up his return to the Commons via the by-election.

Occurred 15 May 2026

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Right split may hand Burnham Makerfield

Survation's pre-poll projection undersold Burnham's eventual twenty-point margin.

Occurred 22 May 2026

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Burnham takes No 10 without a ballot

Burnham's Makerfield win on 18 June was the precondition for his re-entry to Parliament and the leadership bid.

Occurred 13 Jul 2026

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This Event

Burnham storms back to win Makerfield

A governing-party by-election where both turnout and vote share rose points to Burnham's personal pull rather than a national Labour recovery.

Led to

Starmer quits as PM and Labour leader

Starmer resigned four days after Labour's Makerfield hold, citing the PLP's private verdict.

Occurred 22 Jun 2026

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Craig wins Manchester in its first second round

Burnham's move to the Commons at Makerfield vacated the Greater Manchester mayoralty Craig has now won.

Occurred 30 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

Ian Davidson, Acting Returning Officer for Clacton

Davidson's office printed a 90cm ballot paper for the record 34-candidate field, with nothing in electoral law capping candidate numbers or the £500 deposit each pays. He expects the paper's size to raise printing costs and slow the count into the early hours, a strain that follows from the major parties' boycott, not from turnout.

Scottish Labour members

Members now choose between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan after Monica Lennon fell one MP nomination short of the three-MP, three-MSP threshold, a bar set by MPs and union officials rather than the wider membership. Whoever wins takes office having faced only one rival on the members' ballot.

Labour Party

Labour gained Penistone East from Reform on 20 August but lost Harraby South to Reform the same night, a wash that undercuts any claim of momentum. The party can point to beating Reform in a genuinely fought contest, but not to a pattern running only in its favour.

Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats took two of Reform's May wards, Almondbury on 13 August and St Neots Eynesbury on 20 August, the latter on a 29.8-point rise in their own vote share. Both results let the party claim it is the beneficiary when voters turn against Reform, not Labour or the Conservatives.

Reform UK

Reform UK can point to winning Clacton unopposed by the other major parties and to taking Harraby South from Labour, a ward it had never previously contested. That gives the party two results to cite even as three previously held wards changed hands elsewhere in August.

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.