In the perpetually damp precincts of Greater Manchester, where the rain seems less a meteorological event than a form of municipal penance, the voters of Gorton and Denton are being invited this Thursday to perform one of those quaint rituals that still pass for democracy in these islands. A by-election, no less: the sort of contest that normally registers on the national consciousness with all the urgency of a parish council debate over dog fouling, yet this one carries the faint whiff of obituary. For here, in a constituency stitched together like a budget suit from the remnants of Manchester Gorton, Withington and Denton and Reddish, Labour’s long dominion faces the distinct possibility of an undignified eviction.
One pictures the scene with a certain sardonic relish: umbrellas blooming like poisonous fungi along the streets of Longsight and Burnage, the occasional kebab wrapper eddying in the gutter, and a electorate—28 per cent of it answering the call to Friday prayers, the rest variously resigned, resentful or simply absent—deciding whether to stick with the devil they half-know or sample something newer and shinier from the populist or pistachio-coloured ends of the spectrum. The seat itself is a fresh-minted artefact of the 2023 boundary review, that periodic act of cartographic vandalism by which Westminster convinces itself it is listening to the people. It is England’s fifteenth most deprived constituency, a distinction it wears with the weary pride of a man who has won the wooden spoon at the village fête. Thirty-five of its forty Manchester neighbourhoods sit in the bottom quintile for deprivation; 45 per cent of the children live below the breadline; the average household income in parts of Longsight would not cover a modest season ticket at Old Trafford. Demographically it is a patchwork quilt of modern Britain: 57 per cent White overall, but with swathes where British Pakistanis predominate and the Muslim population reaches 28 per cent. The Manchester wards are young, student-heavy, graduate-prone and aggrieved; the Denton wards are older, whiter, more routinely employed and quietly furious about the state of the high street.
In 2016 half of them voted Leave, a fact that still causes certain Islington dinner tables to emit a low, keening sound. Manufacturing has long since packed its bags; what remains is the service economy, the benefits economy and the eternal economy of complaint. Into this fertile soil of discontent stepped Andrew Gwynne in 2024, Labour Co-op standard-bearer and former health minister, who secured 50.8 per cent of the vote and a majority of 13,413. It looked solid enough at the time—until one remembers that it represented a 16-point drop from the notional 2019 figure and that Reform, the Greens and even the Workers Party had begun nibbling at the edges like mice in a larder. Gwynne’s tenure proved shorter than a Lib Dem leadership contest. In February 2025 he was suspended from the party after a WhatsApp group—those digital confessional boxes of the modern politician—leaked remarks deemed antisemitic and, for good measure, unflattering about an elderly constituent.
One can only imagine the private horror in Labour HQ: not the offence itself, perhaps, but the discovery that someone had been so careless as to commit it in writing. Gwynne soldiered on as an independent until January 2026, when 'significant ill health' and medical advice that further parliamentary labours might prove fatal provided the exit ramp every politician secretly craves. He was promptly appointed Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead, that glorious euphemism for “you’re out, old boy.” The by-election was called for 26 February, the second under Keir Starmer’s premiership and, one suspects, the one that will be studied in party seminars under the heading “How Not to Lose a Safe Seat.”
The candidates number eleven, a figure that suggests either glorious pluralism or the sort of fragmentation one associates with post-imperial Balkan states. At the centre, or rather clutching the centre with whitening knuckles, stands Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, a Manchester city councillor, former European Parliament candidate and professional lobbyist for the Arup Group, whose selection had all the smooth inevitability of a Soviet show trial. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester and local hero who can actually win elections, had thrown his hat into the ring with the enthusiasm of a man scenting a path back to Westminster and perhaps, whisper it, a future leadership bid. The National Executive Committee, in its wisdom, voted 8–1 to block him—Starmer and most of the high command against, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood abstaining, Deputy Leader Lucy Powell in favour. Fifty Labour MPs protested; Angela Rayner, Sadiq Khan and Ed Miliband were said to be unimpressed. The message was clear: better a safe pair of lobbyist hands than a popular mayor who might remind the membership what winning used to feel like. Stogia now campaigns on government investment, more GPs, breakfast clubs and a crackdown on fly-tipping—worthy pledges that have the authentic ring of municipal PowerPoint. Whether they will move the needle in a seat where the main grievances are rather larger remains to be seen.
Challenging from the right—or at least from the direction currently fashionable—is Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin, the academic who discovered that sociology lectures on “British values” play rather better on GB News than in the senior common room at Kent. A former professor, honorary president of Students4Reform and one-time pizza delivery boy in these very streets during his Salford undergraduate days, Goodwin has the air of a man who has read too much Pareto and decided the circulation of elites requires a personal intervention. His literature promises a referendum on Starmer, crackdowns on crime and grooming gangs, tax cuts, more police and stop-and-search. Past remarks on family breakdown, childlessness, fertility and the cultural implications of mass immigration have been denounced, predictably, as everything from misogyny to Islamophobia—a charge that in a constituency with a large Muslim population carries the weight of tactical voting. One almost admires the audacity: the intellectual who once analysed populism from afar now embodies it, clipboard in hand, promising to speak for the people while commuting from Hertfordshire. Reform’s internal polling has them confident; their leaflets, alas, sometimes forget the legal imprint, a technicality now under police investigation. Campaign manager suspended for offensive posts; GB News complaints; the usual circus. Politics, as ever, imitates art—bad art.
From the environmental left comes Hannah Spencer of the Greens, a Trafford councillor, former Greater Manchester mayoral candidate and, gloriously, a 'working plumber'. One cannot help but feel this is the perfect metaphor: a woman who actually fixes leaks now offering to fix the leaks in the body politic. Spencer’s pitch is the full Green prospectus—wealth tax, rent controls, £15 minimum wage, nationalised utilities, free prescriptions, dentistry and eye tests, better-insulated homes and, inevitably, a robust stance on Gaza that has seen her literature translated into Urdu and endorsements roll in from Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Salma Yaqoob and The Muslim Vote. She has knocked on 18,000 doors and claims the race is neck-and-neck with Reform, Labour a distant third. Her opponents mutter darkly of “grubby deals” with non-standing parties; she denies it with the serene certainty of one who has communed with the wind turbines. In a seat where fly-tipping and heating bills matter rather more than net zero by 2035, the plumber’s pragmatism may yet prove her strongest asset—or her undoing when the bill arrives.
The supporting players provide the essential British ballast of eccentricity. Sir Oink A-Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party; Nick Buckley of Advance UK; Charlotte Cadden, the Conservative former detective chief inspector and trustee of Sex Matters; Dan Clarke of the Libertarians; Sebastian Moore of the SDP; Joseph O’Meachair of Rejoin EU; Jackie Pearcey of the Liberal Democrats; and Hugo Wils of the Communist League. Each will receive their handful of votes, their moment on the hustings, their paragraph in the local paper. The Workers Party stood aside, declaring that a Labour-Reform loss would benefit the working class—an exquisite piece of dialectical reasoning. Your Party urged tactical anti-Reform voting. The field is crowded, the message fragmented, the likely winner anyone’s guess.
Polls, those modern Delphic oracles with the reliability of a wet bus timetable, show the race as a statistical migraine. An Omnisis survey gave Greens 33 per cent, Reform 29, Labour 26. Find Out Now had Reform slightly ahead before apologising for the small sample. Electoral Calculus and others foresee Reform or Greens triumphant, Labour humiliated. Lord Hayward tips the Greens; Robert Ford calls it a pollster’s nightmare. Hypothetical polling with Burnham as candidate gave Labour a landslide; without him, the roof caves in. Whatever the numbers, the story is the same: a safe Labour seat reduced to a three-horse race in which the horse in the red rosette looks distinctly lame.
The campaign has been a joyless affair of rain-soaked hustings, accusations of racism, police probes into sausage rolls offered for poster-sticking (Labour insists it was “ordinary hospitality”), and the usual online bile. Labour backbenchers are said to be despondent, some privately hoping for defeat to hasten the day Starmer is invited to spend more time with his family. Reform talks of a “referendum on Keir”; the Greens of “cutting the cost of living while ending complicity in genocide”. The minor candidates add colour and little else. In the end, turnout will be low, the winner will claim a mandate the size of a postage stamp, and the new MP will discover that representing one of England’s poorest seats involves rather more casework on damp housing than speeches on the floor of the House.
One is reminded of those late-Roman emperors who paraded their triumphs while the barbarians massed at the gates. Gorton and Denton is not the end of Labour, still less of British democracy; it is merely a symptom. A symptom of a politics in which identity has replaced class, gesture has replaced governance, and the electorate has learned, with weary cynicism, that none of the offerings on the ballot quite matches the menu. Whoever prevails on Thursday—plumber, pundit or lobbyist—will inherit a constituency that deserves better than the slogans it is being sold. The rain will continue to fall, the potholes will remain unfilled, and the voters, having done their bit, will return to the serious business of getting on with life. In the grand satirical pageant of these islands, it is hardly the most edifying spectacle. But then, as any student of human folly knows, spectacle is what we do best. The curtain rises tomorrow. One almost feels sorry for the cast. Almost.