This article is an on-site version of our Inside Politics newsletter. Subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every weekday. If you’re not a subscriber, you can still receive the newsletter free for 30 days
The Greens have won the Denton and Gorton by-election, a historic result by any measure. By-elections are best understood as health checks: a bad result doesn’t mean you are going to die, but they are an important sign of how you are doing.
And as health checks go, slumping to third place and being beaten by another party of the left is very much a “call an ambulance urgently” result. It will increase the pressure on Keir Starmer and with it the possibility that his time as prime minister may be nearing a close. (I don’t think it changes his long-term prospects all that much because there was essentially a near-zero chance of Starmer leading Labour into the next election in any case.)
I will tackle the row over voting behaviour in a future email — for now I want to talk about what the result tells us.
Left split
Turnout for the by-election was 47.6 per cent, down very slightly from 47.8 per cent at the 2024 general election. Scores on the door in percentage figures, because I think that better captures the important dynamics in by-elections.
Hannah Spencer (Green Party): 40.7 per cent (+27.5 percentage points since the last election)
Matthew Goodwin (Reform UK): 28.7 per cent (+14.7)
Angeliki Stogia (Labour): 25.4 per cent (-25.3)
Charlotte Cadden (Conservative): 1.9 per cent (-6)
Jackie Pearcey (Liberal Democrat): 1.8 per cent (-2.1)
This is a much bigger victory for the Greens than forecast by the pollsters, and the reasons are obvious.
When I visited the seat I was struck just how many people liked the Greens and/or Spencer. But more importantly they knew what they didn’t want to happen, which was to wake up with a Reform MP, particularly one such as Matthew Goodwin, whose public pronouncements are so far from moderate opinion and whose statements about Britishness were seen by many people I spoke to as a direct attack on them personally.
Two polls published just before the by-election showed the Greens narrowly ahead. This was decisive in making the Greens the option of choice for anti-Reform voters.
Of the four by-elections that Reform has contested this parliament (two to the Westminster parliament, one to the Senedd in Wales, one in Holyrood) Nigel Farage’s party has won just one of them — in Runcorn, very narrowly. In that race, the previous Labour incumbent had literally been convicted for assaulting one of his own constituents.
Reform keeps adding more and more divisive positions to its platform and as a result, most British voters are going to try to stop it forming a government.
Labour is governing badly and over the past 18 months it has equivocated on the issues on which people most oppose Reform. So, where there is a viable way to stop Reform that doesn’t run through voting Labour, people will often take it. True of Plaid Cymru in Caerphilly and the Greens in Gorton. I’m not saying these parties don’t have an appeal of their own to some voters: they really do.
But this by-election is a demonstration of the fact that there is a fear of Reform across the country that makes it hard for it to win an election, and a contempt for Labour that means there is no guarantee it will be the sole beneficiary of the desire to stop Farage. Indeed for Labour, unless it makes big and far-reaching changes, it is at risk not just of being defeated at the next election but of being replaced as Britain’s main party of the left.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Bluesky and Georgina on Bluesky. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
Now try this
I had a wonderful time on holiday in DC — I caught up with a good friend who very kindly let me use their spare room and I visited a lot of museums. The standout for me was the National Portrait Gallery, because it is so common to see portrait galleries suffer from a kind of cultural cringe, where they just make themselves inferior art galleries.
The United States’ National Portrait Gallery is a really clever and well put-together genuine history of a country told through its portraits that both manages to make some quite bad portraits interesting and to show off its stronger works superbly.
The room of the presidents’ portraits is a triumph, but my favourite curatorial choice actually concerns a portrait of a president elsewhere in the museum. I have to admit, when I first saw Thomas Edgar Stephens’ wonderful portrait of Dwight Eisenhower, I thought “what a shame that this isn’t in the presidents’ room”, as the Eisenhower portrait in that exhibition is nowhere near as good. But then I turned and saw that it faces this lovely Howard Chandler Christy painting of Douglas MacArthur. It’s one of the great historical counterfactuals that MacArthur might have been the GOP candidate for president and not Eisenhower, and it is so cleverly embodied by putting the two great generals opposite one another.
My thanks to Georgina, Jen, Anna and Jim for filling in so brilliantly and for Georgina for organising it all. However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend.