Why an Andy Burnham win in Makerfield could boost Labour now but pave the way for a Reform majority

The parliamentary party know that, with numbers like that, if they don’t change leader, they are toast three years from now.

If the Greater Manchester Mayor wins the by-election, he has a path to Downing Street.

Labour would likely receive a boost with Andy Burnham in No10 due to his popularity with a Survation poll showing 54 per cent of Labour members having a strong positive view of him, but it could be short-lived, and it could open the door to a Nigel Farage majority government.

Keeping a foot in both camps

Labour is a broad church and straddling both wings of the party will be a tough job for the man known as the King of the North, something Keir Starmer has found difficult despite winning the last general election in a landslide.

Just look at the vote on the welfare bill when backbenchers stopped the Prime Minister in his tracks.

If infighting breaks out again, rest assured Nigel Farage will zero in on this, using the chaos on the left as a weapon to punish them politically.

How to solve a problem like Rachel Reeves

If, as reported in the i Paper, Mr Burnham keeps Rachel Reeves as his Chancellor to calm the markets, that will come with keeping her fiscal rules, which do not go hand in hand with the more socialist programme that he would instinctively want to pursue.

It’s possible that No10 and No11 could potentially become nightmare neighbours, with Mr Burnham wanting greater spending and borrowing, with Ms Reeves wanting to continue to tightly control the purse strings as she has over the last two years as Chancellor. Economic growth may continue to be an afterthought.

The optics for Labour could be bad; it could lead to mixed messaging from No10 and the Treasury.

This would present Mr Farage with another opportunity to attack, but more importantly allow Reform to present a more coherent set of economic policies to the country, plans their Treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick has already spoken on including lowering taxes, greater deregulation, and smaller government with a smaller civil service.

In other words, it would show that they are the real grown-ups in the room when handling the economy.

A man without a mandate

If Andy Burnham walks into No10, arguably his biggest problem is the fact that he would have been put there by winning a by-election in a constituency of 105,000 people.

That’s if the coronation that many in the Parliamentary Labour Party would like takes place.

If a contest did take place, then a simple majority of Labour’s 250,000 members would be responsible for putting him in power, hardly a ringing endorsement from the British electorate. The optics would not be favourable.

Expect Mr Farage to attack his legitimacy. Every decision made and every piece of legislation passed would be scrutinised not just in the normal way you would expect, but it would be promptly followed by: “Well, the public didn’t vote for that, did they?”

This would haunt Mr Burnham as it did Gordon Brown, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.

It would allow Mr Farage to attack at every conceivable opportunity, allowing the Reform leader to potentially panic Mr Burnham into calling a General Election. When the pressure is on, mistakes can happen.

There’s no better example than that of Theresa May. She called a snap general election, believing she had picked the right time to do so. At that point, her party had a working majority of 17 seats.

After that election, she had blown the Conservative majority and had to rely on the DUP to prop up her government.

There’s every chance an under-pressure Mr Burnham could call it wrong and underestimate Mr Farage, as so many have done before.

Trying to be all things to all voters

The Greater Manchester Mayor has already indicated he won’t make too many changes to areas such as immigration, something he will review rather than make wholesale changes to.

He must do that to appease the centre-left of his party and because he knows it’s a major concern to the public, one he can’t be seen not to act on.

The problem for the man who is seen as the darling of the left is that this approach will bring him into direct conflict with allies such as former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who has already called Shabana Mahmood’s immigration policy “un-British”.

This is a crack that will only expand and one Nigel Farage will exploit to the fullest.

You can say many things about Reform, you can agree or disagree with them, but one thing’s for sure: they own issues like immigration, with an Ipsos poll earlier this year showing 46 per cent of people polled said they trusted Mr Farage’s party on the issue.

The insurgent party say they have a plan, including leaving the ECHR, and can present a plan with little or no infighting.

Mr Burnham doesn’t have that luxury; he must appear to be tough on the issue, but his backbenchers will give him limited latitude on what he can do to tackle it.

As far as many are concerned, the party are already going too far.

While Mr Farage would march forward with very clear plans for immigration, deregulation, and tax cuts, safe in the knowledge that he has full control over the direction of his party, just as Mr Trump does with the Republican Party in America, Mr Burnham would inevitably face a continuation of a battle Sir Keir has faced so far in his premiership: trying to straddle both wings of his party, a battle that contributed to the demise of other leaders such as James Callaghan and Neil Kinnock.

The road for Mr Burnham could be rocky; expect Mr Farage to try to use this to build his road to No10.