A historic victory for the Greens, a creditable performance by Reform, and a disastrous result for both the Conservatives and Labour.
Those were the key messages for the parties from the ballot boxes of Gorton & Denton on Thursday.
The Greens were widely thought to have a chance of winning – but only narrowly. But in the end, they confounded the pundits by winning as much as 41 per cent of the vote – a far cry from the party’s previous best by-election performance of a mere 10 per cent.
It was a striking way of securing the party’s first parliamentary by-election victory.
The party was undoubtedly helped by the appeal of its strongly pro-Palestinian stance for the many Muslim voters who live in the constituency. That is not a source of support that will be available in most of the country.
Still, it matched the party’s current average standing in the national polls, even though the constituency was not particularly fertile territory for the party because of its substantial minority population.
It still represented a doubling of the support the party won locally in 2024, and there is no reason to believe that the party’s performance suggests that any significant decline has occurred in its overall popularity.
But for Labour, there was little comfort. The party had managed to persuade itself it could pull off a narrow win, yet in the event it came third, thereby casting doubt on its much-repeated claim that it is the only party that can stand between Reform and victory in 2029.
The party’s 25 per cent of the vote was half what it secured in 2024 – and its tally on that occasion already represented a 16-point drop on its vote in 2019. Labour simply lost yet more Muslim votes than it had already done in 2024.
With all eyes on the Greens, Reform just achieved an electoral win that paves the way for a turquoise tsunamiAt the same time, the party found itself trying to fend off Reform in predominantly white, working-class and often impoverished parts of the constituency.
In short, the party could no longer rely on the support of the two demographic groups that had hitherto enabled the party to dominate elections in the area.
Still, at least Labour had been in apparent contention during the by-election campaign. The Conservatives never achieved that status.
In the event, the little that was left of the party’s electoral base after it won just 7.9 per cent of the vote in 2024 disappeared almost entirely. At 1.9 per cent, the party recorded its lowest ever share of the vote in a Westminster by-election.
It seems that both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have been left with plenty of thinking to do.
John Curtice is Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde, and Senior Fellow, National Centre for Social Research and ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’
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