Alexandra Vivona: The fear and loathing in Gorton and Denton

Alexandra Vivona is a family lawyer based in London. She is a grassroots activist and comments on US and British politics.

The Westminster bubble has spent their time gnawing on its own scandals, but the real story, the genuine barometer of where British campaigning is heading, lay hundreds of miles away in the rain‑soaked streets of Gorton and Denton. This is a constituency split down the middle, a place where two political climates exist side by side: Manchester’s youthful, diverse wards on one hand, and Tameside’s older, more traditional communities on the other.

Electoral Calculus claims this seat might even fall to Reform, projecting them at 32 per cent to Labour’s 22.6 per cent and the Greens not far behind on 23.3 per cent. The predicted probability of victory is Reform 61 per cent, Labour 21 per cent and Greens 18 per cent, turning what was once a Labour stronghold into a three‑cornered brawl.

The seat itself contains eight distinct wards: Burnage, Denton North East, Denton South, Denton West, Gorton and Abbey Hey, Levenshulme, Longsight and Audenshaw. Each one brings its own electoral flavour, its own backstory, its own tensions. Manchester’s wards are young, mobile and diverse, with significant population under 35, while the Tameside side skews older and more rooted. You can feel the difference physically when you cross from one into the other.

This was a by‑election I wanted to see firsthand. Not through the usual sanitised tranquilliser of party press releases, but through the raw weather of it: doorstep arguments, half‑lit streets, volunteers stomping through puddles. Politics is only ever truly understood when it’s blowing sideways in the rain.

It was raining steadily when I checked into the hotel, the sort of constant Mancunian drizzle that dulls the edges of everything except political ambition.

The Industrial Estate Odyssey

Reform HQ sits on a Denton industrial estate which has all the glamour of a tax return. The car park was alive with activists. I leaned out of my window, asked if they were Reform, and was directed toward an office thrumming with energy.

Security on the door nodded as if I were entering a private members’ club for the permanently aggrieved. Inside, it felt more like a campaign start‑up than a fringe insurgency: banners, posters, stacks of literature, a photo wall ready for digital consumption.

Matt Goodwin moved past with the steady confidence of a man who has done the work and knows it shows. Zia Yusuf watched everything with quiet precision. An ex–Mumford & Sons guitarist appeared with the kind of unexplained surrealism you eventually stop questioning in politics.

The activists were friendly, brisk, and thrust a clipboard into my hand. Paper, not apps. Ink, not pixels. The old ways. Data is king, and the disciples know it.

Before long, my London polish dissolved and the Mancunian accent came roaring back.

Into Levenshulme, the Forbidden Zone

I stared at the route sheet in disbelief when I saw our destination. Levenshulme. I asked George Hollyhead, the activist I was assigned to, whether this was a joke. He explained that Reform insisted on canvassing everywhere, arguing it was undemocratic to allow whole areas to become no‑go zones. Noble, brave or slightly naive depending on your point of view.

Rain lashed the windows as we drove. Light dimmed. The atmosphere took on the feel of a social science field trip conducted under hostile conditions.

The first door hadn’t even slammed shut behind us when a woman threw open her downstairs window and unleashed a torrent of abuse that could have stripped varnish. She kept going long after we’d moved on, screaming as if we’d stolen something from her, sanity, perhaps.

Every door on the street glowed with Green Party signage. Thousands of tiny, fluorescent reminders that this was not friendly terrain. It felt less like canvassing and more like walking through a theme park designed by George Orwell.

Then, out of the mist, a man with a camera. Eyebrows raised to the heavens. A glint of disbelief. And then the recognition hit: Aaron Bastani, co‑founder and public face of Novara Media, eyebrows raised in amused astonishment.

He looked at our group and asked, with visible disbelief, whether Reform were truly canvassing this side of the constituency. His expression suggested the answer ought to have been no.

“Reform? Here? Really?”

Yes. Really. And the astonishment on his face was the most British thing I’d seen all day.

At this point, the Reform group decided my five‑foot‑three frame and blonde bob did not make me ideally suited to the rising street hostility and ushered me back toward HQ. Chivalry is not dead in British politics; it simply wears waterproofs.

A Darkening Contest

Constituency Chairman, Rob Barrowcliffe, radiated optimism despite the political storm. Three canvassing sessions a day. Volunteers flat out. The classic battle cry of campaigners running on determination and too little sleep. If we lose, he said, there was nothing more we could have done.

If this by‑election is a preview of the general, then Britain is in for three years of political trench warfare conducted in drizzle. Hostility. Suspicion. Demographic territories defended like fiefdoms.

Electoral Calculus’ projections show why emotions here run so high. Labour may have won 50.8 per cent of the vote in 2024, but their predicted share has collapsed. And the Manchester wards, younger and more Green‑inclined, drag the race leftward while the Tameside wards pull hard in the opposite direction. A seat cracked down generational and ideological lines is now expected to produce one of the most volatile results in the country.

Hotel Bar Seminary

Later, at the hotel bar, I met the future of British politics in the form of young activists, everyone seemed to be called Adam. They were polite, Mancunian, and entirely free of the red‑pill nonsense the commentariat claims is consuming all young men.

I had a slight exchange of words with a young female councillor who complained that she wasn’t allowed to run her own TikTok account.

That’s Gen Z: Politics is increasingly just branding with a ballot box attached.

Sunday Surge

Despite my commitment to the previous night’s wine list, I arrived bright‑eyed for the 10 a.m. session, baffling the HQ lads who had assumed I was dead.

Lee Anderson appeared to declare that if Reform could win here, they could win anywhere. Gawain Towler stalked the streets in red scarf and tweed.

Residents were weary. One woman swore everyone had knocked on her door this week, and the numbers backed her up. Labour fielded around a hundred activists on Sunday, and the previous day the area had already been heaving with hundreds more.

Tactical voters spoke cryptically about “doing what’s best for the community,” which invariably means “voting against the people we dislike.”

A regional campaign manager (also named Adam) summarised the battlefield like a general marking trenches. Levenshulme is Green. Longsight is Labour-ish. Burnage, Gorton and Abbey Hey are the pivotal swing wards.

Interesting, it appears the Greens are focusing on leafleting rather than canvassing. Tameside Council candidate, Raymond Dunning, declared that the Greens “aren’t knocking because they’ve nothing to say to the people here,” He further dismissed their rhetoric as merely: “Greyhound dogs and a load of bollocks.”

What Triggered the Contest

The by‑election was precipitated not by policy failure or political fatigue, but by the fallout from a vile and deeply damaging WhatsApp scandal centred on former MP Andrew Gwynne. Messages leaked from the Labour WhatsApp group Trigger Me Timbers revealed Gwynne making offensive remarks about the very residents he was elected to represent, including saying he hoped a 72‑year‑old constituent “croaks” before the next general election, after she complained about bin collections.

The messages also showed him joining conversations laced with racist, sexist and derogatory slurs, contributing to what investigators later described as “complete disregard” for standards in public life among group participants. Gwynne was suspended from the Labour Party in 2025 and ultimately resigned in January 2026, forcing the by‑election.

His downfall has become a symbol of something larger and far more corrosive: a Labour hierarchy seen as insulated, coarse, and contemptuous of ordinary people. The revelations sparked genuine anger in Gorton and Denton, where residents already felt politically overlooked.

Seeing their own MP joking about their deaths, mocking vulnerable individuals, and disparaging local communities confirmed a suspicion long whispered on doorsteps, that the party’s local machine had grown detached from the lives and dignity of those it claimed to champion. The scandal has created a vacuum of trust, and every candidate now must contend with the shadow of a party exposed as out of touch with its own electorate.

Welcome to Gorton

I’m frustrated that this by-election hasn’t had more coverage and that the news cycle is once again dominated by scandals amongst the elite, all taking place within the Westminster village. This only feeds into the problem of an electorate increasingly suspicious and apathetic towards politicians.

Looking closer, it feels like a warning, a premonition of what the next general election will look like. Hostility, demographic silos, tactical voting dressed up as moral superiority, activists marching through hostile terrain with clipboards held like shields.

Gorton and Denton is modern Britain in miniature. Fractured. Suspicious. Bristling. And utterly unpredictable.

And if the Electoral Calculus projections are right, the chaos has only just begun.