NI’s Bev Craig wins Greater Manchester mayoral by-election as first female mayor

The King of the North has departed for Westminster and a fresh face now claims the throne.

In the wake of Andy Burnham’s swift elevation to Number 10, Greenisland-born Bev Craig has emerged victorious in the contest to replace him as Greater Manchester mayor following what represents the largest by-election in British political history.

The ex-Manchester council leader defeated Reform UK’s Sian Astley to become only the second person and the first female to occupy the region’s top political position. While she may not have replicated Burnham’s overwhelming dominance, the final winning margin proved comfortable nonetheless.

Operating under the supplementary vote system employed for mayoral elections, Ms Craig fell marginally short of securing the 50 per cent threshold of first preference votes needed for an outright victory, reports the Manchester Evening News.

However, once second preference votes were factored in, Ms Craig cruised to triumph with over two thirds of the total vote.

Delivering her victory address on the Co-op Live platform that has previously hosted luminaries including Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish and Bruce Springsteen, Ms Craig pledged to ‘fight for a better life for all of us’.

“My promise to you is that I will make this city region better and I will work for everyone,” she continued. “I will be a mayor for everyone.

“We have to heal, we have to move away from divisive politics that pit neighbour against neighbour.

“We will work together, we will deliver it together and we will build a Greater Manchester that works for all of us, where everyone feels welcome and everyone has the chance to succeed.”

Speaking afterwards to the Manchester Evening News, she said: “Look, I’m ecstatic, but it’s also incredibly humbling to have people place their trust in you because they believe in this city region, they believe that Greater Manchester can be even better, so I’m excited to get stuck in.”

So what does this mean for Reform?

While the party enjoyed a remarkably strong showing in May’s local elections, securing over 100 council seats across Greater Manchester – sweeping all but one of the 25 seats in Wigan and claiming 18 of 19 in Tameside – this marks their third consecutive by-election loss in the conurbation.

Suggesting that backing for Nigel Farage’s movement in the area might be levelling off, Ms Astley secured 20% on first preference votes – a lower proportion than her colleagues Rob Kenyon and Matt Goodwin achieved in Makerfield and Gorton and Denton respectively.

The Green Party’s Geraldine Coggins finished in third place with 12% of the ballot, while Restore Britain’s Marlon West garnered 8.5%, the Tories’ Phil Eckersley took 7.6%, the Liberal Democrats’ Richard Kilpatrick claimed 2.7% and independent candidate Marcus Farmer received 0.5%. Sian Astley described the second-place finish as worthy of ‘congratulations’ rather than ‘commiserations’, saying: “We’ve just come second with a stonking result for Reform, far better than we did in 2024, I think we did really, really well. I am happy. Of course everybody wants to win. I haven’t been in politics for long. I think that there’s a bit of a bounce going on at the minute.

“I think people are hopeful about what the Labour Party are going to deliver, with Mr Burnham, and I think Bev’s kind of attached to that. So I think second is a really good result for us, and I think they probably should have done a lot better, or expected to do a lot better on the first round.”

The Greens’ Geraldine Coggins maintained that voters were ‘backing’ her party in ‘far bigger numbers than ever before’.

“We’re in very volatile times and what we’ve seen with Labour’s vote, you know, really going down, you know, it’s quite a bad result for them that we’re even going to a second round,” she stated. “We’ve never been anywhere near this, and this is in the honeymoon period of a new prime minister, you know, this is when they should be at their absolute peak.

“And so yeah… I’d be very interested to see what happens to their support as time goes by.”

Hannah Spencer, Green MP for Gorton and Denton, noted the party had grown its vote share in 2026 compared to her campaign for the position in 2024. She posted on X: “We’ve come such a long way, and that hasn’t happened by accident. It has happened by all of us stepping up and being part of this campaign, and doing whatever it is that we could do to help.”

The by-election came about following Mr Burnham’s choice to head back to Westminster. He won June’s Makerfield parliamentary by-election in a landslide.

And having succeeded Sir Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader last month, he became the UK’s seventh Prime Minister in a decade.

However, his move faced criticism in certain circles due to the expense – thought to be around £5m – of staging the Mayoral by-election merely two years after his overwhelming re-election for a third term. Over 2.1m people were entitled to vote in yesterday’s poll.

Only one in four turned out for a contest which, having been eclipsed by Mr Burnham’s ascent to Downing Street and the Clacton by-election sparked by Nigel Farage’s resignation, had been labelled the ‘election hardly anyone is talking about’.

Turnout stood at 25.14pc, with 538,659 votes recorded from an electorate of 2,142,779. That marks the lowest figure on record for the mayoral position in the region.

In the 2024 election, turnout reached 32.05pc. It was 28.9pc in 2017 and 34.7pc in 2021.

The evening was Ms Craig’s triumph, and her success marks an extraordinary journey for the 41 year old Northern Ireland native. A decade and a half ago, she had never been elected to any position, yet now she occupies one of the most powerful roles in politics, overseeing a £3bn budget with authority spanning housing, health, policing and transport.

During her manifesto presentation a fortnight earlier, set to music from Oasis, the Charlatans and Happy Mondays, she pledged to build more affordable homes, freeze Metrolink fares and provide free bus travel for all youngsters aged 11 to 18.

Speaking to the Manchester Evening News throughout the election period, Ms Craig recounted arriving in the city as an ‘unconfident’ 18 year old to attend Manchester University with ‘no money, no friends, no connections’.

“I moved here and found a place that’s friendly, that gave me opportunities,” she said. “This has always been about giving back and standing up for people who didn’t have a voice.”

She now has the opportunity to fulfil precisely that promise.

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