LONDON – Andy Burnham is about to get an early verdict on his leadership from his very own backyard.
More than 2 million people are eligible to vote on July 30 in Britain’s biggest ever by-election. They will be choosing the prime minister’s successor as mayor of Greater Manchester, after he vacated the post in June to return to the House of Commons and challenge Keir Starmer for the premiership.
Burnham secured the near-unanimous backing of Labour MPs who bet on him to reverse a decline in popularity that began almost as soon as the party won a huge majority in 2024’s general election.
How their candidate Bev Craig performs this week will be the first major gauge of whether the gamble they took in changing leaders mid-Parliament can pay off at the ballot box.
Burnham’s energetic first week in power is likely to benefit Craig, according to Jon Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool. “It’s all down to national fortune, the dramatic transformation of Labour under Burnham,” he said. “Bev Craig floats on the Burnham tide.”
Since he took power on July 20, evidence of a Burnham bounce is already evident from early polls that put Labour on level-pegging or even ahead of Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK, which has consistently led surveys of voting intention since April 2025.
A by-election poll published on July 28 by More in Common put Labour’s Craig extending her lead to 39 per cent, well ahead of Reform’s Sian Astley on 19 per cent and Geraldine Coggins of the Greens on 14 per cent. Phil Eckersley of the Conservatives was on 12 per cent, with the Liberal Democrat and Restore Britain candidates both on 8 per cent.
While Craig’s poll rating is well below the 63 per cent of the Greater Manchester vote secured in 2024 by Burnham, it nevertheless suggests Labour is rebounding since a set of damaging local elections in May when the party shed more than three quarters of the seats it was defending in the 10 councils that make up Greater Manchester.
Under Starmer, Labour was also bruised by a parliamentary by-election in February, when they lost the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton to the Greens, who had barely challenged there in 2024.
Burnham has vowed to bring “Manchesterism” – a set of policies focused on devolution that he honed during his time as mayor of the north-western city – to the rest of Britain.
He has advocated for handing powers from Westminster to the regions and, after setting up a branch of the prime minister’s office in Manchester last week, he is planning an announcement on devolution in the coming days.
In Manchester, Craig, has promising to build on Burnham’s record.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a moment as big as this, where we have somebody that’s done a lot for Greater Manchester, that’s been mayor of this place, is able to become prime minister, is able to put into practice some of the things that we’ve talked about for a long time,” Craig told Bloomberg.
“To hear the prime minister saying that he will give us that control over the levers that we need to make lives better for our residents, that’s fantastic.”
Currently leader of Manchester City Council, Craig is touting a slew of measures to bring down the cost of living, as well as more funding for tired high streets, and compulsory purchase powers targeting landowners who block development.
First, she must beat – as polls suggest she will – Astley from Reform and Coggins of the Greens, both of whom are promising a break from the past.
The challenger parties had, in the months before Burnham’s takeover, highlighted the threat they pose to Labour. In February, the Greens won a parliamentary by-election in the Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton on a 26 per cent swing. Then in May, Reform hoovered up 106 new seats in council elections in Greater Manchester, while Labour shed 112 of the 146 they were defending.
It was Burnham’s emphatic victory over Reform in the Makerfield by-election in June that persuaded Labour he had what it takes to see off the populist challenge. Starmer resigned within days and, with no one standing against Burnham in the ensuing leadership contest, he secured the endorsement of 379 of his party’s 403 MPs.
As mayor, Burnham boasted of overseeing a growth miracle in the region: GDP per capita across Greater Manchester increased by 15 per cent between 2016 and 2023, compared with 4.2 per cent for Britain as a whole.
Since becoming prime minister, he has touted his record of bringing the city’s bus network into public ownership and using devolved powers to attract private investment for infrastructure.
Critics contend that Greater Manchester’s good fortune was not evenly distributed. While the metropolitan borough of Manchester saw GDP per head soar 26.6 per cent, surrounding districts such as Tameside, Oldham, Bury and Bolton saw output growth underperform the English average of 4.5 per cent. That is something Reform’s Astley has highlighted on the campaign trail.
“If we head to Bolton, to Leigh, to Bury, to Oldham, their high streets are struggling because you did nothing for them,” she said in one video addressed to Burnham, while pointing out new skyscrapers built in the more prosperous centre of the city.
Reform declined a request to interview Astley. In its Manchester manifesto, the party promised to “create the toughest police force in Britain” and lists other priorities including cutting the number of asylum seekers offered accommodation in the city, cutting waste and reducing costs for drivers.
Coggins of the Greens also identified issues she says Burnham has failed to address. In a Bloomberg interview, she said she wants to end the right-to-buy policy introduced in the 1980s that allowed council tenants to purchase their homes from the local authority, saying it had fueled a “decades-long selloff of our social housing”.
“I didn’t hear anything about better funding for local councils, about tackling private landlords, tuition fees and student loans,” said Coggins, currently a councilor in the Manchester borough of Trafford. She also wants compulsory purchase powers to take over empty shops, and has vowed to join Green-led London councils in commissioning a review of the role of policing in immigration raids.
After the electoral successes of Reform and the Greens in Manchester earlier in 2026 – and the “big fat raspberry” voters gave as verdict in the local elections to Starmer, the vote on July 30 is a “helpful first exam” for Burnham, according to Rob Ford, politics professor at the University of Manchester.
“He’s starting to dig them out of the hole,” Ford said. “But there’s still an awful lot more climbing to do just to get back to where they were.” BLOOMBERG
