ASHTON-IN-MAKERFIELD, England — At first glance, it might seem that Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of 3 million residents of bustling Greater Manchester, is bidding for a lesser job by running to be the backbench member of Parliament for Makerfield, a downtrodden working-class constituency of just 105,000.
But if he wins Makerfield’s special election on Thursday, Burnham could well be running the entire country. As prime minister. By, like, July.
It’s hard to imagine a more consequential local vote to fill a vacant legislative seat than Thursday’s by-election in this cluster of former coal mining towns tucked between the cities of Manchester and Liverpool in northwest England.
Britain’s quirky parliamentary system, combined with a Labour Party in open revolt against Prime Minister Keir Starmer, means that a Burnham victory here will give him a seat in the House of Commons and make him eligible to launch a Labour leadership challenge — one that Burnham, currently the most popular figure in the party, is well-placed to win.
The rules are as old as Big Ben. But even in Britain, it seems unprecedented for the keys to 10 Downing Street to dangle so immediately in the picking of a single local member of Parliament, as if a fast-track to the White House were at stake in electing a replacement member of Congress from a Chicago suburb.
“It’s a ‘Sliding Doors’ moment for British politics,” said Jill Rutter, senior fellow at the Institute for Government, a London-based think tank. “If he loses Makerfield by one vote on Thursday, things will happen completely differently than if he wins Makerfield by one vote.”
The result is a local election that feels like a national referendum.
“I can’t remember anything like this in my life,” said Wayne Waring, 64, a retired highway worker who was sipping coffee at Makerfield Towne Centre as a TV news crew outside interviewed another beleaguered voter. “You can’t get out the front door for all the campaign leaflets they drop.”
This all-down-to-Makerfield moment is the result of Labour’s tumultuous run since returning to power two years ago and Britain’s recent history of cycling through prime ministers like paper towels.
Starmer swept into Downing Street in July 2024 on Labour’s biggest landslide in a generation, ending 14 years of Conservative Party rule that included Brexit, the country’s exit from the European Union.
But early missteps, including cuts in winter fuel subsidies to the elderly, hollowed out Starmer’s approval numbers. Within months, he was polling as low as Liz Truss, the Conservative prime minister who lasted 49 days before her own party booted her in 2022.
As voters have soured on Labour and the Tories, they have rewarded formerly fringe parties, particularly Reform UK, the surging anti-immigration party led by Brexit architect Nigel Farage. Reform UK trounced Labour in multiple recent elections, including two months ago when Labour lost more than 1,500 local council seats.
In the resulting panic, nearly 100 Labour lawmakers called for Starmer to step down. Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned last month in a prelude to a leadership challenge of his own. Defense Secretary John Healey quit in June, blaming Starmer’s failure to further boost military spending.
The prime minister is tottering. Into that void steps the 56-year-old Burnham — if Makerfield will have him.
Burnham — left-leaning, working-class, Cambridge-educated — has been a Labour stalwart since joining the party as a teenager. He previously served in Parliament for 16 years for nearby Leigh, serving brief terms as minister of health and of culture. After making an unsuccessful run to lead the party in 2015, he swapped national office for local office and has been elected three times as Greater Manchester’s mayor, building a record as a pragmatic populist.
Most polls show him as the top choice of Labour voters to replace Starmer, but he’s not a shoo-in. Streeting, who hails from the center-right, Tony Blair-wing of the party, said Wednesday that he intends to initiate his leadership challenge within days.
Starmer, reading the room, could step aside and anoint Burnham to succeed him, as the embattled Truss did under pressure when Rishi Sunak replaced her in 2022. But so far, the current prime minister has promised to fight.
Under Labour Party rules, any challenger needs the formal backing of at least 81 party lawmakers (20 percent of their 402 House of Commons members) to trigger a leadership vote. Then, the contest goes to a wider vote of registered party members. The winner will be Labour’s leader and, because Labour holds a majority in Parliament, the prime minister.
The rest of the U.K.’s nearly 50 million voters must wait until the next general election to weigh in on who runs the country, which isn’t required to happen before August 2029.
To enter the fray, however, Burnham needs a seat in Parliament. So Josh Simons, the member of Parliament from Makerfield already tarnished in a recent scandal over investigating journalists, opened one up for him.
“I am standing aside so that Andy Burnham can return to his home, fight to reenter Parliament, and if elected, drive the change our country is crying out for,” Simons said on resigning his seat.
But first, Burnham has to win it.
This corner of northwest England is where George Orwell came to live among unemployed miners to write “The Road to Wigan Pier,” his 1937 portrait of the working class as a symbol of everything the Labour movement existed to defend. But, like many parts of postindustrial Britain, it’s no longer the solid Labour territory it was for more than a century.
The area voted in favor of leaving the E.U. in the 2016 Brexit vote by a margin of more than 2 to 1. Two months ago, Reform UK won seven of the eight local council wards that make up the Makerfield constituency. Political experts say that most Labour figures would lose Makerfield badly right now.
If Burnham loses to Reform UK candidate Robert Kenyon, a plumber, council member and military veteran, the calculus becomes murkier for everyone involved.
Starmer would be spared his most formidable challenger — but he would watch his party lose another seat it has held for generations to a party that did not exist 10 years ago.
If Burnham wins, he will sail into a leadership battle having dented Reform UK’s momentum, something Labour insiders are desperate to do. They take hope that Burnham’s local-boy cred and successful run as mayor makes him more popular than his party.
“Andy Burnham is the only Labour Candidate I would vote for,” said Simon, 60, a lifelong Labour voter who went for the Green Party in May’s local council elections and declined to give his last name because, he said, “nothing good can come of it.”
Volunteers have poured in from around the country, mostly from Labour’s well-organized machine but also for Reform UK and another upstart anti-immigration party, Restore Britain.
“It’s been crazy busy by any standard of a by-election,” said an official from the Burnham campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Three days before the vote, a youth sports club where the Burnham campaign is based was crawling with volunteers picking up fliers and maps before heading out to canvass.
They have knocked on every door in the district six times, the official said, three times the norm. More than 800 volunteers showed up on the final weekend before the vote, and they expect similar numbers Thursday, the official said.
The final polls gave Burnham a slight edge over Kenyon. But not everyone is convinced.
“He’s just using Makerfield as a stepping stone, isn’t he,” said Waring, the retired highway worker.
Waring is exactly the voter Labour is trying to hold. A lifelong Labour supporter, he voted for Brexit. But he stuck with Labour until the local elections in May, when he jumped to Reform UK. It was the party of his father and grandfathers that changed, he said, not himself.
“I just felt that Labour was no longer what it was when I was young,” Waring said. “My dad was a miner. Labour was for the working class. They brought the [National Health Service].”
And Burnham?
“He’s a nice chap. But he’s a little too left wing for me. My biggest concern is illegal immigration.”
So, Waring said, he planned to vote for Kenyon.
“He’s not trying to be prime minister,” he said. “He just wants to be an MP looking after Makerfield.”
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