Labour set to approve Andy Burnham’s by-election run

Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee is poised to allow Andy Burnham to stand in the imminent Makerfield by-election, removing one of the obstacles to him challenging for the Labour leadership.

Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, needs to be an MP to trigger a Labour leadership contest to oust prime minister Sir Keir Starmer. 

Luke Akehurst, a Labour MP who sits on the NEC, indicated that the body would not stand in the way of Burnham running for the Makerfield seat, despite it having blocked him from the Gorton & Denton by-election in February. 

“Everything I’m hearing suggests they are going to give him a waiver to allow him to stand, even though he’s a metro mayor,” he said.

Gemma Bolton, another NEC member, said Burnham should be on the Makerfield ballot: “He should be given the chance to stand.”

Downing Street has also signalled that Starmer will not try to block Burnham’s candidacy. 

Burnham would still face a tough fight in the Wigan constituency against Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which crushed Labour in the area in last week’s local elections. 

It is not legally permitted to serve as an MP and Greater Manchester mayor simultaneously.

Some Labour officials are concerned about the cost of fighting the Makerfield by-election and a Greater Manchester mayoral by-election, which together could cost more than £1mn. “It’s a problem when the party has no money,” said one senior union official.

Although the next full meeting of the NEC is on Tuesday, the officers’ group is expected to meet on Friday to discuss the Makerfield candidacy. 

Josh Simons, the former MP for the area, dramatically quit on Thursday evening to make way for a Burnham comeback to the House of Commons.

Simons said on Friday morning that opting to stand down was the “most difficult decision” he had made. But argued that Burnham could enact the “urgent, radical, courageous reform” that the country needed. 

Rob Ford, a politics professor at Manchester university, described Burnham’s plan as a “high risk, high return” test of his popularity. Victory in Makerfield would be “exhibit A” that Burnham can pull voters back from Farage’s party, he said. 

Bookmakers’ odds currently suggest a slightly higher chance of victory for Labour than Reform in the seat. 

John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said Labour’s chances of holding Makerfield would have been below 5 per cent “if it were anybody other than Andy Burnham” standing there, given it was already one of the tightest Labour-Reform seats in the country. 

One Labour MP told the FT that by-elections were always unpredictable. “Andy will have a clear message that the by-election is all about him returning to London to bring down an unpopular prime minister, but voters don’t like being told what to do, and they could easily decide that the by-election is about something else entirely.”

Steve Reed, the housing secretary and Starmer loyalist, told the BBC on Friday morning that Labour needed to focus on delivering the change that voters wanted. 

“We cannot have any more weeks like this one, where we turn inwards and talk to ourselves like we were the Tories,” he said.