The Reckoning at the Gates of Manchester: What Gorton and Denton Tells Us About the Death of New Labour’s Second Coming

From 13,000 Majority to Third Place: Labour’s Gorton and Denton Reckoning

Is this the moment the “Red Wall” in Manchester finally crumbles, not under the weight of a Tory surge, but beneath the suffocating hubris of its own leadership?

As voters in Gorton and Denton head to the polls today, they are not merely choosing a local representative; they are delivering a verdict on a premiership that has become a carousel of U-turns, internal purges, and the return of a political era many thought long buried. The air in Gorton and Denton is thick with more than just the usual February drizzle; it carries the distinct scent of a party in terminal decline, gasping for air in a seat it has held, in various guises, for generations.

The catalyst for this crisis was the ignominious exit of Andrew Gwynne. Once a rising star and Health Minister, Gwynne’s career imploded in February 2025 following the exposure of WhatsApp messages that were as cruel as they were revealing. His remarks, mocking a constituent’s death, making antisemitic slurs, and directing vitriol at his own colleagues, offered a window into a culture of entitlement. Though he officially cited “ill health” for his final resignation last month, the stain of his suspension lingered like a persistent fog over the campaign.

A Stitch-up in the City

The ensuing selection process was a masterclass in the “control-freakery” that has defined the Starmer era. Sir Keir’s personal intervention to block Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham from the ballot was not a tactical move for stability; it was a transparent attempt to sideline a popular rival. By denying local members their choice, Starmer has effectively gambled the seat to protect his own authority.

To watch the Prime Minister rally in Levenshulme for Angeliki Stogia, a candidate many see as an “inoffensive” placeholder, felt less like a show of strength and more like a desperate attempt at resuscitation. The activists whisper that his presence is the “kiss of death.” Ironically, the two figures working hardest to save Stogia are those Starmer has most deeply wronged: Deputy Leader Lucy Powell, the first person he sacked from his cabinet, and Burnham himself, the man he barred from the race.

The March of the Outsiders

While Labour eats its own, the vultures are circling. Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin, backed by a high-profile Nigel Farage, has framed this contest as a “referendum on Keir Starmer.” Despite a last-minute High Court drama regarding missing imprints on 81,000 “faux handwritten” leaflets, Goodwin’s momentum is undeniable. Reform gained their first North West MP in Runcorn and Helsby last year by a mere six votes; in Gorton and Denton, they sense a larger kill.

On the left, the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer, a local plumber with genuine working-class credentials, is tapping into a profound sense of betrayal among the radical left and the constituency’s significant Muslim population—voters who feel abandoned by Starmer’s shift toward the centre-right. Recent polling from Omnisis places the Greens at 33 percent, with Reform at 29 percent and Labour trailing in a humiliating third at 26 percent.

Now, in one of Britain’s most deprived constituencies, voters will render a verdict not merely on a parliamentary seat but on the soul of a government that has squandered its historic mandate in less than two years. The bookmakers give the Greens 4/6, Reform 15/8, and the party that holds the seat a humiliating 4/1. What happened?

There is a particular quality to political humiliation that distinguishes it from ordinary failure. Ordinary failure is the product of circumstance, bad luck, forces beyond one’s control. Humiliation, by contrast, is earned. It is the fruit of arrogance, of contempt for the people one claims to serve, of mistaking a landslide for a mandate and a ballot paper for a blank cheque. Today, in the grey Manchester morning, as polling stations open across Gorton and Denton, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party confronts the bill for its arrogance, and it runs to thirteen thousand votes.

That was the majority Labour piled up here in July 2024, when a grateful nation, exhausted by fourteen years of Conservative misrule, handed Starmer the keys to Downing Street. It was a constituency, on paper, as safe as any in England: a patchwork of working-class Manchester wards and Tameside towns, stitched together by the 2023 boundary review, where nearly half the children live below the breadline and Manchester’s poorest neighbourhood, Longsight East, sees average household disposable income of just £23,000 a year. The constituency is the 15th most deprived in England, with 35 of the 40 neighbourhoods in the Manchester portion falling within the most deprived quintile. Wikipedia These are not the kind of communities that ought to be giving their votes to the Greens or Reform. And yet here we are.

What the Bookmakers Know

The odds, on the eve of polling day, read like a post-mortem written in advance. Labour candidate Angeliki Stogia, having shortened late to 100-30, began the campaign at 5/1, while the Green Party remained odds-on at 4/6, having drifted from their high of 1/3 as late money came in. Racing Post According to William Hill, Labour were 13/2 to win just 24 hours before polling day, with the Greens the long-time favourites accounting for almost half of all bets placed, while Reform, shortening into 15/8, represent the bookmaker’s worst financial nightmare. William Hill

These are not the numbers of a defending party with a thirteen thousand majority. They are the numbers of a party facing electoral extinction in a place it has taken for granted for thirty years.

The modelling confirms what the markets suspect. The New Statesman’s most recent forecast puts the Green Party on 31 per cent, Reform on 30 per cent, and Labour on a barely credible 29 per cent, with just a few hundred votes projected to separate first from third place. New Statesman An academic has described it, with admirable understatement, as a “pollster’s nightmare,” with any of three parties capable of winning. Wikipedia

A Constituency Born in Crisis

To understand what is happening here, you must understand what kind of place this is. Gorton and Denton did not exist as a constituency before 2024. It is, as one observer has noted, something of a Frankenstein creation: the urbanised, predominantly Muslim wards of Gorton, Longsight and Levenshulme sewn together with the predominantly white working-class towns of Denton and Reddish. The four Manchester wards are, on average, 40 per cent Muslim and nearly 60 per cent non-white, while Denton is its mirror image: largely white, largely working class, and increasingly susceptible to Reform’s appeal. It is, in microcosm, the coalition Labour built its 2024 landslide upon. And it is, accordingly, the place where that coalition is most visibly disintegrating.

They will decide it, and not in Labour’s favour. The question of Gaza, which the Starmer leadership once hoped it could manage as a communications problem, has become instead a moral rupture. Focus groups conducted in the constituency in recent weeks revealed the depth of that rupture. One participant, summarising the mood with the directness that the professional political class never quite manages, said: “I feel like Labour used to be for the working class. That’s how they got their votes this time around. But when they actually came in, they were not for the working class, they were more for the middle class.”

There it is. Not in the language of political science, but in the language of a community that has been lied to.

The Three-Way Squeeze

The Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer, a local plumber who has championed her working-class credentials throughout the campaign, has run a sophisticated and at times controversial campaign. Leaflets distributed in Urdu urged voters to “punish Labour for Gaza” and to “give the faltering walls a push.” Spencer, photographed outside a mosque wearing a keffiyeh, has positioned herself as the moral alternative to both Labour’s complicity and Reform’s hostility. The campaign has drawn accusations of sectarianism from Labour and their allies. Those accusations may be fair. They are also, conspicuously, the argument of a party with nothing else to say.

The right wing trolls hated seeing our campaign video in Urdu.

So here it is in Bangla instead.

I love our party! 💚🙌🏼 https://t.co/contmwgRqq

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) February 24, 2026

Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate and a former academic turned television commentator, has run his own campaign with the boisterous certainty of a man who believes history is moving in his direction. He may be right. Reform have concentrated their efforts on the Denton wards, where they face little opposition on the right and where white working-class voters have grown accustomed to feeling invisible to the party that once claimed to represent them.

And then there is Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, an inoffensive Manchester councillor who, through no fault of her own, finds herself the wrong candidate in the wrong by-election at the worst possible moment in the wrong prime minister’s career.

The Man Who Was Not Allowed to Run

No honest account of this by-election can avoid the central act of political self-sabotage that has defined it from the beginning. When Andrew Gwynne announced his resignation on health grounds in January, a clear path opened for Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, popular, credible, deeply rooted in this part of the world, to return to Westminster. The constituency’s voters knew him. Trusted him. Many of them had voted for him.

Burnham applied to be the Labour Party candidate. His candidacy was blocked by the party’s National Executive Committee, which included the prime minister. The decision was, by any rational political calculation, extraordinary. One does not have to be a cynic, though it helps, to observe that Burnham in Westminster would have been a political rival to Starmer; that a popular, northern, working-class-identified mayor winning a Labour seat might have created a focus of opposition inside the parliamentary party. Whether that consideration played any part in the NEC’s decision is not something the NEC will ever confirm. The consequence, however, is plain. Labour has fought this by-election without its most credible asset, relying instead on a candidate chosen by the machine over the people.

Ironically, if Labour does pull off the result here, the two people Starmer will have most to thank are precisely the two he wronged: Lucy Powell, the first person sacked from his cabinet, who has led the campaign with energy and commitment, and Burnham himself, who has provided near-daily support despite being publicly humiliated. There is a mordant quality to this that the parliamentary diarists will savour for years.

The Shadow of Mandelson

Hanging over all of this, like a fog that will not lift, is the question that Starmer’s allies most desperately wish the public would stop asking. The appointment of Peter Mandelson as British Ambassador to Washington was always a peculiar choice, given that Mandelson’s career has been punctuated by two resignations from cabinet and a record of political calculation that makes even his admirers nervous. The revelation of his associations with Jeffrey Epstein transformed a peculiar choice into a toxic one. On the doorsteps of Gorton and Denton, activists have reported that voters raise it unbidden. It is not the only issue. It is not even the primary one. But it is the question that crystallises a broader unease about Starmer’s judgment, about who he surrounds himself with and whose interests he ultimately serves.

What the Numbers Actually Mean

Step back from the heat of the campaign and the arithmetic is stark. In 2024, Labour took 18,555 votes in this seat, more than half the total cast. Reform came a distant second with 5,142, and the Greens third with 4,810. Turnout in 2024 was 47.8 per cent, significantly lower than the national average, in part because the seat appeared to be a foregone conclusion. Today, with three parties mobilising activists across the constituency, turnout may rise. But the votes that Labour is haemorrhaging are not going to one place. They are fracturing: Muslim voters and the progressive left moving toward the Greens, white working-class voters in Denton moving toward Reform. A party can absorb a swing to one opponent. A simultaneous pincer movement from two different directions, on two different grounds, is a different kind of problem entirely.

It is also a problem that extends far beyond this single constituency. Gorton and Denton has the demographic characteristics, youthful populations, ethnic and religious diversity, a politically engaged progressive segment and a white working-class base mobilised by Reform’s grievance politics, that are present in multiple Labour-held urban areas. What is happening here today is, in other words, a preview of what may happen across dozens of similar seats.

What Comes Next

If the Greens win, it will be a historic upset in one of Labour’s safest seats and the clearest possible signal that Gaza has become a durable symbol of broken faith with a significant portion of the Labour coalition.

If Reform win, it will demonstrate that Nigel Farage’s movement can now conquer urban strongholds as well as coastal towns and former pit villages, and that the white working class, once Labour’s bedrock, has completed a realignment that the party’s leadership spent years insisting was temporary.

If Labour somehow holds on, the margin will tell its own story: a 13,000 majority reduced to hundreds of votes is not a vindication.

“It is a warning sealed with a voter’s X”

The prime minister visited a community centre in Levenshulme this week to show his support. Some activists took his presence as a sign of growing confidence. Others, in the brutal shorthand of party politics, said he had given any remaining chances the kiss of death.

Both groups may have been right about different things. That is the nature of a political moment when a party is no longer sure what it stands for, whom it represents, or why anyone should vote for it.

The polling stations close at ten o’clock tonight. The count will follow. And in a constituency where Britain’s most deprived children go to school on empty stomachs, the three parties competing for their parents’ votes will discover whether fear, moral outrage, or tribal loyalty has proved the stronger force.

It is, in the end, a question about what kind of country we are becoming. The answer, whatever it is, will not be comfortable.

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In Gorton and Denton today, Labour is not defending a majority. It is defending the fiction that it deserves one...

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