Mick Clifford: 'We’re done with you lot' — but Makerfield may have just elected the next UK prime minister
Labour's Andy Burnham at Ashton Town FC in Ashton-in-Makerfield after winning the Makerfield by-election triggered by the resignation of Josh Simons. Picture: Peter Byrne/PA
Ashton couldn’t wait to see the back of the most historic by-election in British history. Today, Friday, the former mining village which is the hub of the Makerfield constituency was trying to make it all go away.
Just after 3am, it had a new MP, Andy Burnham, who is set fair to become the UK's next prime minister.
That’s all well and good, but in Ashton they had enough of the whole thing.
“We’re done with you lot,” one local man declares at the door of the Robin Hood pub.
With that, he lifted his tabloid newspaper in a half wave and took off across the road.
He wasn’t alone. The people of Ashton did not feel the love from the nation’s politicians nor the world’s media. And it would be hard to blame them. The voters here, and the whole constituency, had no more than a walk on role in the power play to displace the staid and wooden Keir Starmer with the King of The North.
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By Friday, the place was running back to normal. There were no smiling candidates looking down from telephone poles, nor discarded posters blowing through the street like tumbleweed.
The only hint of a recent election was in the façade of the closed Cross Keys pub across the road from the Robin Hood. Every window on the two-storey building was taken up with the read posters proclaiming, 'Vote Andy, vote hope'.
Burnham had no connection to this place that is over 35km from his Greater Manchester base where he has served as a popular and efficient mayor. He landed here because a Labour party colleague, Josh Simons, resigned his Westminster seat in order to get Andy into parliament from where he could displace Starmer.
That, many posited, would be the only way to stop the march of Nigel Farage and his Reform UK.
The constituency isn’t a place with its own identity, but a patchwork of former mining villages thrown together for electoral purposes. For the last three weeks or so these villages were lovebombed with literature and door knocks. Whole forests were sacrificed to get Andy in to put Keir out. Reform had a weak candidate in Rob Kenyon but the extent of Burnham’s win was arresting.
Last May, Labour won 35% in this constituency in the local elections. Burnham more than doubled that to 55%, leaving Reform grasping at 35%, and all others beaten out of sight.
This was all about Burnham’s status as King Of the North. According to some canvassers the party’s name was rarely mentioned in front of voters. “Hi, we’re with Andy,” was a typical opener.
A signal as to the Burnham way might be seen in the campaign HQ, about half a mile from the centre of Ashton, along a road lined with small neat houses that bleed from one village into the next.
The Andy pandies set up shop in the Stubshaw Cross community and sports club, a low squat building that hints of decay and could do with a lick of paint.
There is even an old Guinness sign at the front door that is about three decades out of date in the home of the black stuff across the Irish Sea.
“Very old Labour,” one reporter remarked outside the club on Friday morning as the campaign team packed up to go. “They could do with a piece of that.”
A half mile away, in the ground of Ashton Town FC, Burnham held an election rally for his new constituents and all who made it possible.
He hugged Josh Simons. No greater love hath a politician than to lay down his seat for another. Josh, presumably, will get his reward in this parliament or the next.
“The first thank you I have got to do is to the people of this wonderful area who looked after us so well,” Burnham said like the out-of-towner that he is.
This was, he said, “a change moment” and he and his team hoped to “lay out a new path for Britain”.
Between every line he spoke was the assumption that pretty soon, by proclamation or party election, he will be the new leader of Labour and prime minister.
Now the fun begins.
Burnham is casting himself as the man, the only man, who can save the UK from Nigel Farage. He performed with aplomb to get back into parliament, but whether he can spread his magic across a party remains to be seen.
Unlike other messiahs, such as Tony Blair in his day, Burnham is not retailing a detailed project to make politics work for people.
He does not have around him a ready made team practiced in the arts and with the programme. He just has Andy, man of hope, man of the people, who has succeeded in making a damn fine job out of his role as mayor.
It might be inconvenient to mention that one who had a similar CV before ascending to high office was Boris Johnson.
What Burnham does appear to have is a sense of authenticity, or at least the appearance of it, at a time when that quality is high in the minds of voters.
Trump and Farage project a manufactured authenticity that has done wonders for both.
Whether Burnham’s is real, whether he has a plan to turn his country around, whether he can keep Farage at bay, will all be fascinating to watch. Maybe even for the poor benighted people of Makerfield trying to get back to normal after the madness.
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