It was 4.30am on Friday and the smiling face of Green candidate Hannah Spencer confirmed that Sir Keir Starmer’s worst fears had come true. The remarkable victory by the 34-year-old plumber in the Gorton and Denton by-election felt like a seismic moment in British politics.
“To my customers, I’m sorry, but I think I might have to cancel the work that you had booked in, because I’m heading to parliament,” Spencer beamed. Starmer and his aides did not see the funny side.
Some Labour MPs had harboured hopes they could cling on to this seat in Greater Manchester, a party stronghold for almost the whole of the last century, but those hopes were dashed before dawn broke.
Spencer’s victory was comfortable — she won 41 per cent of the vote in a seat where the Greens were previously nowhere. Reform UK’s Matthew Goodwin finished second and Labour’s Angeliki Stogia trailed in third place.
“A Green victory is easily the worst outcome,” admitted one Labour minister. Ominously for Starmer, this is a sign that Labour’s dominance of “progressive” politics is under threat and that the left vote is fracturing.
Just as the right vote split at the 2024 general election, with Nigel Farage’s Reform hacking away at Conservative Party support, could Labour be about to face a similar fate at the hands of the insurgent Greens?
Few Labour MPs believe the by-election result will provoke an immediate new threat to Starmer’s leadership, just weeks after the prime minister saw off calls for him to quit by Scottish leader Anas Sarwar.
“We’ve looked over the edge, we don’t want to go back there,” said one Labour MP. At least not for now. Because the message from Gorton and Denton to Starmer’s nervous MPs is that hardly any seat is safe.
The looming local elections on May 7 — in which Labour could be hammered in voting for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and a raft of English councils — suddenly look even more perilous for Starmer.
The Green victory upends earlier assumptions that Labour’s main opponent at the next election will be Reform. Spencer’s beaming face confirmed that Labour is now fighting on two fronts.
A Reform win in Gorton and Denton would have been easier for Starmer to shrug off. “We’ve got our lines ready,” said one Labour strategist ahead of the result. “If Goodwin wins, we’ll say: ‘This shows if you vote Green you get Reform. Only we can beat Reform.’”
But Spencer’s win will now allow the Greens to position themselves as the “anti-Farage” party in swaths of working-class Britain and argue that a vote for Labour is the “wasted vote”.
This is only one by-election and there is always a danger at Westminster that single results are over-interpreted. But Starmer’s fear is that at the next general election, expected in 2029, a fractured leftwing vote would allow Reform to come through the middle and Farage would walk into Downing Street.
Starmer’s electoral strategy, set out in his Labour Party conference speech in Liverpool last September, is that Labour is in a historic fight to stop Britain descending into the politics of “division” and that only it can stop Farage.
The subtext of that is that even if traditional supporters do not much care for Labour, they might dislike Reform UK even more. That becomes more complicated if disgruntled Labour supporters appear to have another viable vehicle for expressing their disenchantment in the Greens.
Luke Tryl, at the think-tank More in Common, said this week: “It makes it much harder for Labour to run a ‘Macron strategy’, that is ‘however much progressives might be frustrated with us, it is us or Reform and so you have to hold your nose and back us’.”
At the past general election the Greens won 6.7 per cent of the national vote and four seats at Westminster but the party came second in 40 constituencies, 18 of which were in London. In all but one of those seats, the party was second to Labour.
Zack Polanski, the charismatic Green Party leader, will now use Gorton and Denton as a springboard to try to advance into parts of urban Britain with his leftwing prospectus, leading on tackling poverty and criticising Israel over Gaza rather than environmental policies.
“The Green Party saw a record-breaking swing in our direction and more than tripled our vote,” Polanski said on Friday morning. “If we see a swing like this at the next general election, there will be a tidal wave of new Green MPs.”
The local elections on May 7 could see big gains for both Reform and the Greens, with the once-dominant Labour and Conservatives in retreat, an echo of the politics of many other western democracies.
For now, Starmer may have a small amount of breathing space. His exhausted party does not feel regicidal at the moment, and the prime minister and his allies have ensured that Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester mayor and a potential leadership rival, is not yet an MP.
Even the Greens and Reform admitted that Burnham, a popular local figure, would probably have won in Gorton and Denton, had Starmer allowed him to stand.
It was a sign of Starmer’s weakness that he preferred to risk losing the by-election rather than have his rival breathing down his neck at Westminster. Recriminations over that decision will follow in the coming days.
Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves, who delivers her Spring Statement next week, hope that brighter news on the UK economy will help improve voter sentiment.
But that is a long-term aspiration. After the Gorton and Denton defeat, the danger for Starmer is that his premiership is yet again being measured by Labour MPs in terms of months, rather than years.