CRUMBRIA: 19.6.2026
THE Makerfield by-election result should be a strong dose of smelling salts for Reform UK — although not quite the comeback Labour will pretend it is.
Professional northerner Andy Burnmoney — all “ey ups”, luxuriant hair and eyebrow dye — romped home last night by 9,231 votes.
That gave him 54.8%, more than 20 percentage points ahead of Reform’s Rob Kenyon, who finished second on 15,696.
Even if you bolted “vote-splitters” Restore Britain (3rd) onto the Reform vote, Burnmoney would still have won by more than 6,000 votes.
So yes, a bloody nose for Reform.
But before Labour starts deluding itself that a socialist paradise is now an inevitability, this was the People’s Democratic Republik of Makerfield.
A Labour citadel, with a celebrity Labour candidate taking part in a Labour leadership audition.
A number of votes will have been cast for Burnmoney just to get rid of Starmer. Burnmoney is now free to return to the reptile house to erect the scaffold and gibbets for Keirnocchio, a man so wooden that birds nest in him.
But politics always throws up a twist. A plot line that no-one expected.
Does Keirnocchio – his arse going like a windsock this morning – still have something in his bag to rip up the script, or will a surprise Labour candidate emerge to rain on Burnham’s parade?
If not, the public will soon cotton on that Burnmoney was an MP for 16 years. It will be impossible to maintain his “matey-matey-bloke-bloke” persona when serious stuff starts happening.
He’s spent the past nine years running Greater Manchester (socialism paid for by taxpayers), and was knocking around Westminster and Whitehall when the twin towers fell.
Infact, he’s one of the few people who can enter a revolving door behind you and emerge in front.
It won’t be long before the Burnham bounce has exploded like a faulty space hopper and the national mood returns to its usual Planet of the Apes-style civil war.
Makerfield was always going to be a brutal ask for Reform.
It’ll also be an important lesson for the party to invest in a sophisticated social media scanning device so they don’t select candidates who have made a series of important interventions in, er, the national debate about Carol Vorderman’s backside.
The real corpse on the carpet last night was the Conservative Party (4th), whose candidate polled fewer than 1,000 votes (2.19%). That’s more than 3,300 down on two years ago.
Reform took more than 15 times the Tory vote; although the Tories took Aberdeen South, so politics is a real mixed bag right now.
In Makerfield, the Lib Dems (6th) managed 163 votes (0.36%), although there’ll be a stack of Lib Dem voters and Green Party members who put their vote on Burnham to lock out the plumber.
And despite a General Election-level turnout of 58.7% in Makerfield, nearly 32,000 voters (41%) stayed at home.
That may be the most honest verdict of the lot.
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