No, King Andy has not vanquished populism

So that’s it. Populism has peaked. It had its moment in the sun but now it lies gasping for breath on the battlefield of Makerfield, vanquished by the King of the North and his trusty sword of Manchesterism. That, at least, is the tenor of the Andy Burnham fangirling that’s trying to pass itself off as political commentary this morning. From Sky to the BBC to the liberal press, reporters are failing miserably to hide their partisan smirks over Burnham’s win and Reform UK’s defeat. ‘Normalcy’s back’, you can almost hear them say.

It’s a masterclass in wishful thinking. Yes, Burnham won the by-election emphatically. Fair play. He got just shy of 55 per cent of the vote, higher than even the giddiest polls predicted. He increased Labour’s vote share in Makerfield by almost 10 per cent, which feels miraculous in the Starmer era where ‘Labour’ has become a byword for crap, robotic politics. Starmer is toast now: the size of Burnham’s win will turbo-charge his plot to clear Sir Keir out of Downing Street.

And yes, Reform’s result was not great. Plumber turned politician Robert Kenyon — who I interviewed for spiked last week — won 35 per cent of the vote. A total of 15,696 people voted for him, against the 24,927 who went for Burnham. That might be an almost three per cent hike on Reform’s performance in the General Election here in 2024. But as Reform leader Nigel Farage candidly said this morning, they were hoping for 18,000 votes.

Yet reports about the death of populism are greatly exaggerated. To extrapolate from Makerfield to the entire nation is to engage in wilful self-delusion. It is to overlook all the unique factors at play in this electoral clash.

First there’s the Burnham factor. Yes, the ‘King of the North’ stuff is bollocks, more likely to be spouted by the tweeting classes of SW1 than by your average Mancunian who’ll be well aware of Burnham’s failings on the rape-gang scandal and his past guzzlings from the Kool-Aid of wokeness (he thought a woman could have a penis until about five minutes ago). Yet there’s no denying the northern star cachet of the Manchester mayor. Who’s Labour going to replicate that with elsewhere in the country? Rachel ‘rictus grin’ Reeves? Ed Millipede?

More importantly, there was the ‘Kick Out Keir’ factor. King Andy was gifted Makerfield, essentially, precisely so that he could challenge Starmer for the leadership of Labour and of Britain. This bestowed on the people of Makerfield an extraordinary power over the destiny of the nation — in voting Burnham they could expel from office our flailing, spine-free PM. That’s pretty much unprecedented in the history of British by-elections. It’s not repeatable anywhere else.

Then there was all the tactical machinations of those who hate Reform. For me, the most staggering results from Makerfield were not Burnham’s or Kenyon’s. They were the Lib Dems’ — which got just 0.36 per cent of the vote — and the Greens’ — who got 0.68 per cent. Just 163 people voted Lib Dem, an almost seven per cent drop in their vote share. It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on. It’s not that these parties became toxically unpopular overnight — I wish. It’s that the largely middle-class / public-sector folk who would normally vote for them leant their votes to Labour. Why? To stop Reform.

As the Financial Times found, tactics were key to the Burnham surge. The Lib Dems and the Greens tacitly agreed not to ‘campaign wholeheartedly in the by-election’. One public-sector worker told the FT that they ‘don’t want Reform to get in’, mostly because of ‘their views on immigration’. How striking that the Greens pose as an insurgent party sticking it to The Man, yet as soon as the prospect of a working-class revolt against the uniparty raises its snarling head, they park their am-dram faux-radicalism and do their craven duty to sustain the status quo.

Now that is replicable. In fact, we’ve seen it in other by-elections: the clubbing together of middle-class voters into a Stop Reform lobby designed to frustrate the working-class thirst for change. Reform needs to factor this into its strategising: how to outflank these tactical populism thwarters. Yet far from suggesting populism is on its last legs, the rise of these anti-Reform factions confirms it remains the most dazzling threat to business as usual. Polite society’s very fear of Reform is all the proof we need that populism is alive and well and dangerous.

Then there’s the funniest result of all: Restore’s 6.8 per cent. Restore’s leader, Rupert Lowe, and the Mosleyite geeks who advise him were all over the internet, where they live, yapping about a quake in Makerfield. Some were predicting 20+ per cent for Restore. This, kids, is the danger of internet brain. These perma-online tossers thought that just because they get off on memes of Lowe in a suit of armour saying ‘You’re getting deported’ that the rest of the country would too. They forgot people have jobs. They’re busy.

In the end, Restore did even worse than the British National Party did in 2010, when it won 7.4 percent in Makerfield. They’re so over. They’ve been exposed as a gaggle of spectrum-dwelling meme makers who had the gall to call themselves a party. Some of them clearly thought their rape gang ‘inquiry’ would boost their vote. Deploying one of the worst postwar atrocities as basically an election leaflet was repulsive beyond belief. The working classes will not take kindly to the weaponisation of their daughters’ suffering for clicks and vibes.

Anyone who thinks Burnham will resuscitate Labour and put down the ‘populist menace’ is in for the rudest awakening. All the questions raised by the working classes’ electoral revolts — on sovereignty, borders, immigration, identity — remain unanswered. The days when a ‘king’ could placate the restive masses are long gone.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.