Andy Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election is a big blow for Reform UK and its leader Nigel Farage. Farage and co. will offer up plenty of reasons for defeat in the coming hours and days. We should take these with a pinch of salt.
Reform’s spinmeisters will be quick to suggest that it is all down to the Burnham effect. Gawain Towler, a long-time ally of Farage, admitted as much before the vote. He said that the Greater Manchester mayor ‘does change the weather’, adding that it would be a ‘very, very hard task’ beating him. Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party, meanwhile, will be blamed for denting Reform’s chances of victory by splitting the vote on the right.
Excuses, excuses and more excuses. A Reform win in Makerfield would rightly have been seen as a political earthquake. Losing there is equally dramatic – and not in a good way.
The spotlight will – and must – also turn on Farage himself
Why? Because ultimately politics is about winning and the momentum that comes with victory. Reform appears to be losing political momentum, and doing so at a critical time. Farage can try to sugarcoat the Makerfield result any way he likes but there can be no disguising the fact that he and his party simply failed to get over the line in what was a very winnable constituency. In the most recent local elections, every one of the individual council wards in Makerfield went to Reform. And yet Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon lost to Burnham by more than 9,000 votes. This result is as much a Reform failure as a Labour victory.
A wider and more significant pattern is becoming plain to see. In two critical by-elections – Gorton and Denton in February and now in Makerfield – Reform has lost seats of the kind that will be high on its target list come the general election. Just as troubling for the party’s higher-ups is the idea that its pitch to voters – offering a way out of the gridlock of Westminster’s mainstream consensus – is being trumped by candidates from other parties.
In other words, Reform is starting to lose on its own chosen ground as the pre-eminent political force for real change. Fed-up voters plumped for the Greens in Gorton and Denton, even though Reform started that campaign with a good chance of victory. In Makerfield, Andy Burnham’s ‘change’ pitch trumped anything offered up by Reform.
Reform is starting to lose on its own chosen ground as the pre-eminent political force for real change
Questions have to be asked about the party’s choice of candidates for these critical political contests. Matt Goodwin, a former academic with a history of controversial comments about Islam, was an odd pick to fight Gorton and Denton, a constituency with a sizeable minority of Muslim voters. Equally puzzling has been Reform’s choice of Robert Kenyon, a plumber, to fight Makerfield. Kenyon came across as hopelessly out of his depth from the start, and his bizarre refusal to apologise for his past offensive tweets on social media – including a bizarre comment about the broadcaster Carol Vorderman – didn’t exactly help.
Was Kenyon really the best that Reform could come up with in a political battle that attracted widespread national interest? If so, it suggests, at the very least, that the party will struggle to field high-calibre candidates at the next general election.
The spotlight will – and must – also turn on Farage himself. He has had an easy ride until now, in part because of his strengths as a campaigner and his adept use of social media. The loss in Makerfield will draw fresh attention to Farage’s weaknesses and limitations. His party very much remains a one-man band, in part because he cannot help falling out with others, sooner or later. Farage’s rift with Rupert Lowe and the subsequent creation of Restore has had the most momentous political consequences – not least yesterday in Makerfield, where Restore took a significant chunk of votes away from Reform.
For the first time, Farage is facing an insurgent threat on his right flank and doesn’t appear to know quite what to do about it. He will have to come up with answers – and quickly. Any insurgent force in politics relies heavily on the idea that it is winning. Right now Reform has more than a whiff of defeat hanging over it. It cannot afford many more Makerfields.
