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They flock to Makerfield from everywhere: canvassers and camera crews, MPs, peers and volunteers, from Swansea to Gateshead, 700 a day to help the Labour campaign. Every door has already been knocked four times, boasts the Burnham team.
How does it feel for voters to be the most important constituency in living memory? Most are quite pleased, bar the usual “we only see them round here when they want our votes”. But with a chance to choose a prime minister, never was a vote so valuable.
Beyond Britain’s fate, the world sees in Makerfield a signpost on far-right populism: here, reporters have arrived from Italy, Germany, Sweden and five different Japanese TV news channels, among others. Expecting great rallies and flag-waving marches, they are crestfallen at nothing much to film beyond sparse signs on stakes in front gardens. This is a local, shoe-leather, person-to-person campaign by all parties. Andy Burnham himself leaves a personal video message for anyone who’s out, recorded on their front door security camera to show he really was there, with no grandstanding as he dashes around undecideds across the small towns here.
What a high-risk gamble to trigger an election here, rolling the dice in a constituency where every council ward voted Reform in May, making up part of Wigan, where 64% voted Brexit. Against that, Wigan voted 66% for Burnham as mayor, and he is the only popular senior politician in the country, the only one with a net favourable rating. To lose here would be an unimaginable calamity, everyone arriving at his HQ knows, clutching teas between canvass rounds. If not here, with this ultra-local man who offers them a rare chance to elect their own prime minister, then every one of Labour’s 402 MPs is in peril. Would the party survive?
The prospect of that cataclysmic wipeout has gathered a rarely united Labour campaign. Squeezed in a Makerfield taxi together was Tulip Siddiq – an ardent Keir Starmer loyalist, from his next-door constituency, who tells me that if Burnham wins he should make no leadership challenge – squashed up beside Miatta Fahnbulleh, the first minister to resign after the May elections because she and her constituents had “lost faith and confidence in the prime minister” for lack of clarity about “values” and “purpose”. How odd this campaign is, when Labour canvassers encountering “I hate Keir Starmer” (as voters often say, however unjustly) reply, in effect: “Vote for Andy to get rid of him.” The chief whip, Jonathan Reynolds, has been here, but who is he whipping to say what?
Look, there is John McDonnell, the Corbynite ex-shadow chancellor, pausing between canvasses to tell me what Burnham could do as PM: take control of water companies. No, Burnham need not be constrained by his pledge to stick to the manifesto, as there are wider interpretations available, he says. Torsten Bell, the former head of the radical Resolution Foundation, now Treasury minister, has a canvassing style that sees him bounding like a gazelle from door to door: a husband and wife give him a beaming thumbs up. He gets the best door-knock, when elderly Shirley says she has never voted before: “I’m not political.” But she will vote for Burnham. “Farage is like Hitler and Trump!” she says.
Someone could set up a profitable stall here, selling voxpops to any passing journo. When I worked in the BBC newsroom, it was easy: grab one of each, preferably in a picturesque market with a mouthy stall holder, and conclude “only time will tell”. I can take my pick here, but be none the wiser on the result.
There was the Reform voter whose home bears the sign, “This house is protected by the Good Lord and a pitbull”. He hasn’t voted Labour for years: “Andy will be gone off down to Westminster, won’t he?” Well, yes, that’s what you’re electing an MP to do. Or there was Susan, definitely Labour. “No one I know votes Reform,” she said, though there were Reform signs in gardens down her street. “I don’t speak to them.” The divide, she says, runs deep and many don’t like to say what they’re voting.
Every MP is under orders to be here at least twice. Murmurs condemn a handful of Starmer loyalist ministers not seen here (yet). I never got a reply from the office of one as to whether they had been here. You hear some MPs doubting yet another prime minister is the answer to Britain’s impossible spending problems, alarmed at some Burnham promises – though he denies a report that he would pay billions to the Waspi women’s pensions campaign.
But the big picture here is of right and left, loyalists and rebels, Burnham fans and not so much, knowing that their own, the party’s and the country’s fate depends on victory here. Even those doubting him as PM have no choice but to pray that his unique popularity, warmth and principled clarity will triumph against Faragism. His effortlessly strong and graceful Question Time performance encouraged many, and the misogynist posts of the Reform candidate boosted women’s support: the FT reports him with a 17% lead among women, only 2% ahead with men.
Don’t jinx the result by suggesting Labour is ahead, beg Burnham’s people, poring over meagre polls, less reliable in a single constituency. But the analyst Peter Kellner, YouGov founder, expects a reasonable Burnham win.
A loss would heap fury on Burnham for risking all on a needless contest. A win could save Labour. In the tooth-rattling anxiety of the next week, the prospect of a gloating triumph for Nigel Farage brings Labour people of all shades pouring in, begging Makerfield to “vote Andy for us”.
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