The two main contenders in the Makerfield by-election have now announced their candidates. On Tuesday afternoon (19 May), Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee announced that Andy Burnham had been picked to run, out of a shortlist of one. After the NEC gave him permission to run on Friday afternoon, his selection was a surprise to no one, least of all Burnham. The Manchester mayor has already released his first campaign video and was up in the constituency all weekend.
Two minutes after the Labour Party X account shared this announcement, Reform UK unveiled their own. Robert Kenyon, a self-employed plumber and Reform UK councillor in Makerfield, has been selected to run for Nigel Farage’s insurgent party in this historic vote. Kenyon’s candidacy wasn’t a surprise. He ran for the party in Makerfield in 2024, coming second behind Josh Simons (Kenyon won 12,803 votes to Simons’s 18,202). Reform has framed this contest as a “David versus Goliath” battle.
Reform UK describe Kenyon as its “plucky plumber”, and he has said his family have hailed from the Makerfield area for the past 200 years. Unlike in Gorton and Denton, where Reform chose GB News presenter Matthew Goodwin to run, the party has obviously thought clearly about the importance of fielding a truly local candidate. Goodwin, who had family origins in Manchester, lives in Hertfordshire – Kenyon, on the other hand, lives and works in Makerfield. In his launch video, he said if he is elected, he will be the first MP to be “born in the constituency”.
Kenyon’s local roots could pose a challenge to Burnham. Though the Manchester mayor sent his children to school within the bounds of the constituency, Kenyon is well known in the area. Reform is also biting on Labour’s heels there. Though only a third of the seats on Wigan Council were up for grabs in the local elections on 7 May, 24 out of 25 were taken from Labour by Reform. Our senior data journalist, Ben Walker, suggests in his Britain Elects model that Burnham could win the seat, but by a very tight margin, with Labour winning 39 per cent to Reform’s 36 per cent.
Still, though Kenyon poses a threat to Burnham’s chances, controversies around his past activity on social media have already begun to surface. The Reform candidate is friends on Facebook with a fascist organiser and archived posts from his now-suspended X account appear to show vaccine scepticism, support for Donald Trump and engagement with a Dutch far-right influencer who was banned from the UK ahead of the Unite the Kingdom rally this weekend.
The Green Party and the Conservatives – who also plan to contest this by-election – will announce their candidates later today. Hannah Spencer, the Green Party’s candidate in Gorton and Denton, is also famously a plumber, like Kenyon. One Green Party insider joked that after Spencer’s success in February, “love that Reform have also gone with a plumber”. But speaking to Green Party sources, there is a clear sense that unlike in Gorton and Denton, the party has a much lower chance of success in Makerfield.
Now that the writ has been moved and a by-election officially called, this consequential campaign will begin to get underway in earnest. It will be up to the people of Makerfield to decide the victor in just four weeks’ time; if the polls are to be believed, then the contest is on a knife edge.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: The long coup]
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