It is the biggest by-election in British history. But take a glance at the front pages this week and you wouldn’t know it. Today (30 July) voters in all of Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s ten boroughs will head to the polls to select a replacement for Andy Burnham, who resigned last month from his role as Manchester mayor to make a return to Westminster. This – a fortnight after Burnham’s coronation as Labour leader and less than two weeks after he entered No 10 – is the new Prime Minister’s first electoral test. How well will his party fare?
Labour is quietly confident they will retain Greater Manchester. The polls suggest a comfortable victory. A survey by More in Common from Monday (27 July) predicted Labour would beat Reform by a 30-point margin of 65 per cent to 35 per cent. “All the polls look great, but no complacency here,” a source from the party’s campaign told me. “We’re out on the doors in every borough across Greater Manchester, talking to voters.”
The party has chosen Bev Craig as its candidate. She has been described as Burnham’s protégé and worked closely with him when he was Manchester mayor, as the leader of Manchester City Council. As a councillor, Craig represents Burnage ward, which sits in the middle of Hannah Spencer’s Gorton and Denton constituency. At the May local elections, the Green Party won 17 seats on Manchester City Council and now forms the largest opposition group on the council since 2011. As one Green source describes it, “we were campaigning in Bev Craig’s backyard”.
But Greater Manchester is a far bigger contest than the Gorton and Denton by-election. To Craig, there is clearly something appealing about the possibility of a promotion. Despite being thought of as the prime Labour candidate in Gorton and Denton after Burnham was blocked in February, she declined to put herself forward. “I wasn’t looking to become an MP,” she told me when we spoke on the phone on the eve of polling (Wednesday, 29 July). Craig – who was brought up in Northern Ireland but moved to Manchester when she was 18 – speaks in a brilliantly unique blend of flat northern vowels with a Belfast lilt. Instead, she was lying in wait for a vacancy in the mayor’s office. “This is a job with a fantastic opportunity to genuinely transform life on the ground for people here,” she said.
Craig’s political career has been spent on Manchester City Council – only one of the ten boroughs she will need to persuade to vote for her. But she remains confident that, drawing on her experience of working with Burnham in the combined authority, she can convince the outer boroughs of her plans for the city region. “I was deputy under Andy for regeneration and growth,” she told me, “I know the area pretty well.” She has used this experience to build up a ten-year plan for the city region which includes free bus travel for 11- to 18-year-olds and a “radical plan” for “the genuinely affordable homes that people need”.
The message Labour are taking out on the doorstep is “Greater Manchester’s best days are still ahead of us” – a slightly odd take considering until mid-June, Labour’s new leader had led the city for almost ten years. The party’s critics have accused them of running a “ming vase” campaign – playing it safe in order to avoid rocking the boat and losing the mayoralty. (Labour HQ has, to be fair, had other things to think about). As I have reported previously, the Green Party has thrown all of its institutional heft into the campaign. Reform, on the other hand, transferred the bulk of its campaign staff to Clacton following Nigel Farage’s decision to resign, triggering a by-election in which he is the only candidate from a mainstream party actually willing to fight. When I ask Craig about her opponents, she urges voters to stick with Labour and “continue moving forward” or “risk throwing all of that away”. For Labour to lose in Greater Manchester would be a huge embarrassment early on in Burnham’s premiership. Still, it remains unlikely.
With Burnham now in No 10, the relationship between the two politicians – should Craig be selected as his replacement – will soon change. Instead of being explicitly on the same team, working for the same organisation, Craig and Burnham will be on opposite sides of the table. Has she thought about how she will manage this new working dynamic with her former boss?
“I think this is a unique opportunity for Greater Manchester,” she said. “It’s hard not to overstate the fact that this has literally never happened before, where you have a prime minister who gets the place.” But she still plans to be a critical friend to Burnham. “My priority is Greater Manchester,” Craig told me. “I’ll always put it before my relationships or my rosette.”
[Further reading: Should Andy Burnham make voting compulsory?]
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