Is Farage a busted flush?
After Labour’s General Election victory in the summer of 2024, Andrew Marr glibly celebrated the result as a sign of stability and prosperity. ‘For the first time in many of our lives,’ he said, ‘…Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability.’
As I listened to the fawning response of many Left-wing and mainstream commentators to Andy Burnham’s by-election victory in Makerfield last week - and their gleeful reaction to Reform’s disappointing performance - I was reminded of Marr’s exaltations and, of course, the subsequent egg stains splattered across his face.
The presenters on Friday’s Today programme could barely contain their excitement. Even Tim Stanley and Camilla Tominey, hosts of the quasi-Right-wing Daily T podcast, inflated the import of Burnham’s victory, describing it as the ‘worst of both worlds for Nigel Farage’ and, tellingly, describing Tim’s friend ‘Andy’ - an advocate of open-borders and a Thatcher-bashing, bond market-denying Leftist - as a ‘moderate’. Jess Phillips and John McDonnell, moreover, along with the presenter on LBC radio, predictably lauded the result as evidence of the second coming.
Meanwhile, the Guardian’s John Harris claimed that Makerfield exposed ‘all Reform’s weaknesses’ and, when faced with a popular Labour candidate, its inability to translate activist enthusiasm into votes. Financial Times columnists danced to the headline: ‘Nigel Farage’s Reform UK suffers another by-election blow’.
Like Marr before them, these arrogant talking heads, peering excitedly through their Panglossian, rose-tinted glasses, think that Burnham can save the Labour Party, neutralize the threat from the populist Right and provide a model for its demise. He’s proved it, after all, winning 55 per cent of the vote in Makerfield, more than 20 points ahead of Reform’s Robert Kenyon, and storming to victory in a constituency that voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU in 2016 and returned eight Reform councillors in May’s local elections.
Burnham is the ‘centrist’ saviour and Farage a busted flush. A sigh of relief can be exhaled as politics returns to normal.
This is of course wishful thinking. Burnham won in Makerfield for reasons that cannot and will not be replicated across the country. The self-styled King of the North was a popular local candidate. As Mayor of Manchester, it is widely recognized that he’s raised the city’s profile, tackled homelessness and, with the Bee Network project, improved public transport. ‘He’s done a lot of good with the buses here,’ one elderly woman opined during the run-up to the election.
He also had a trump card to play. He wasn’t – nor has he been tainted by association with – Keir Starmer. For the people of Makerfield, here was a unique opportunity to replace the most hated Prime Minister in modern political history and replace him, not in three years’ time, as a vote for Reform might suggest, but quickly, with an individual that scarcely acknowledges any association with the governing Labour Party. No wonder the people of Makerfield voted for him.
This doesn’t mean the King of the North will see off the threat from Dick Dastardly and his Reform outfit. Within six months he’ll be as unpopular as Starmer. Illegal and legal immigration will continue unchecked, as will two-tier policing; the drip, drip of illegal migrants committing unspeakable crimes against British women and girls will continue; rampant, uncontrolled welfarism will remain a drain on the national coffers, preventing urgently needed investment in our armed forces; and the economy will move ever closer to the precipice. The man who ignored the grooming gang scandal – which, let us not forget, his party’s ideological convictions did so much to facilitate - has no grasp of, let alone plan to deal with, these festering and deep-rooted problems. I suspect we might see a few egg-splattered ‘centrist’ commentators over the coming months and years.
Nigel Farage has not gone away. Reform UK will be the main beneficiaries of Burnham’s inevitable demise, even if Janet Daley, columnist for The Sunday Telegraph, interprets the Conservative victory in Aberdeenshire as evidence of a miraculous revival. Again, according to Janet, it’s nothing to do with Aberdeenshire’s unique local concerns that the Tories spoke to, it’s a demonstration of a UK-wide shifting trend, even if they lost their deposit in Makerfield. Pull the other one.
The Conservative brand remains toxic and, as for Restore, their threat is overblown, as shown by their pitiful performance in Makerfield. They received a lower proportion of the vote than the BNP in 2010.
That isn’t to say that Farage can just sit and wait for Burnham to implode. He needs to choose better and brighter candidates and, most importantly, make a positive case for voting Reform. There needs to be a big, overarching narrative that members can take to the country and articulate with verve and enthusiasm. It’s all too negative at the moment.
If they do – and with it, inspire the public to give them a clear majority in 2029 – the talking heads that inhabit our media and political class will have more than egg yolk on their faces.