There were two Parliamentary by-elections yesterday one of which, Makerfield was much more high profile than the other one in Aberdeen South.

In Makerfield the winner was as many of us expected Labour’s Andy Burnham. He will now go on to challenge Kier Starmer for the Labour Leadership and thereby become Prime Minister. This could herald a massive internal fight in Labour for the leadership or it might be the case that the other potential challengers give up their fights in order to gain a Cabinet position in Andy Burnham’s Cabinet should he become leader. If that’s the case it will not be a Cabinet of ‘all the talents’ as some Prime Ministers have attempted to put together and be more like a Cabinet of the talentless.

Burnham and his party did not just beat their main challenger Reform but beat Reform comprehensively with Burnham getting 54.8% of the vote ahead of Reform’s 34.51% of voter share. This was on a 58.75% voter turn out. Restore did much much better than I and many others might have expected and not only came in in third place on 6.84% of the vote but also saved their deposit. It was also a deposit loss for the Tories, Lib Dems and Greens as they each got less than the 5% of cast votes needed to save their deposits.

So what went wrong for Reform here? Well just about everything. They picked a candidate who might be an excellent councillor (I don’t know if that’s the case) but might not have been suitable for a Parliamentary seat. Reform should have known that their candidate was likely to be subject to all sorts of ‘offence archeology’ and either picked a candidate who wasn’t in danger of such activities or take the decision to say to the offence archologists ‘so what’ and ignore this tactic. Reform were also up against voter inertia and the tendency in some Parliamentary seats for at least 20% of voters in some traditional Labour Party held areas who vote Labour no matter what and who would vote for a dog turd adorned with a red rosette if it was presented to them. Makerfield has been Labour since 1983 and that makes it a very difficult electoral field on which to fight as Labour is a constant, a default if you like, for voters who are not well up on politics to vote for. Reform might also have been hit by the issue of not having detailed enough or well thought out enough policies that could be presented to the voters and be able to defended by the party.

Restore did better than I might have expected but their vote numbers were not that dissimilar to that of the British National Party managed to get in 2010 in this seat. Restore got 3,111 votes in this contest when compared to the BNP’s 2010 vote of 3,229. This was roughly in line with my upper prediction for Restore although the way the votes turned out meant that Restore got third place with this number of votes when compared to the BNP’s fourth place in 2010. Restore seem to have targeted what was the vote that formerly went to the BNP and that’s what they got. What’s clear is that Restore’s entry into this contest did not overly split the Right vote, Restore didn’t get an earth shattering amount of votes and it would not have been enough to make any difference to the top two result.

Burnham now goes to Westminster where he can properly start his fight to become Labour leader. However because Burnham will face the same problems as Starmer has faced and with an unchanged party structure and party attitudes it’s unlikely that he will be able to change things to the satisfaction of the British public. It’s quite likely that football fans will be singing ‘Andy Burnham’s a wanker’ instead of ‘Keir Starmer’s a wanker’ soon.

Whilst the Tories were comprehensively trounced in Makerfield it was a much better result for them in Aberdeen South. This seat, although with different boundaries has been held since the late 19^th century by various Liberal, Tory, Labour, Unionist and Scottish National Party MP’s. The Tories last held it in 2017 but lost it to the SNP at the 2019 General Election after the Tory MP stepped down after being caught up in a sex scandal in which he was accused of groping young men’s bottoms and genitals in a bar in the Palace of Westminster. However it’s important to note that the MP was cleared of these allegations by the Parliamentary Comissioner for Standards.

This is a great comeback by the Tories in Aberdeen South although it is a seat that the Tories have held before, it’s not as if they came from nowhere to win, there’s been previous occasions where the voters here have chosen the Tories. This result should please the Tories and their leader Kemi Badenoch and be some balm for the lost deposit they achieved in Makerfield. Labour just about kept their deposit in this seat which is a far cry from their position in previous elections for this seat.

So to sum up. Makerfield went as many might have expected it to go. People may well have voted for Burnham in order to provide a challenger for the increasingly hated Starmer. They were not prepared to take a chance on Reform even though a Reform win might have plunged Labour into even more internal political bloodletting than they are going to get with this Burnham win.

This contest is a lesson for Reform. That lesson is that they must get better quality candidates and produce policy that is attractive to the voters, addresses the current serious problems in British society but which doesn’t fall apart on close scrutiny. The Tories also have to learn from this defeat, they need to learn to have better between election ground games in seats such as Makerfield such as the Liberal Democrats are excellent at although on this occasion and in this seat it was not a successful tactic for the Lib Dems. The Tories might have kept their deposit if they’d had more of a between election ground game in Makerfield.

The Aberdeen South contest shows that the Tories are not a completely busted flush. They can pick up seats that were taken in landslides for opposing parties in previous elections and in seats where some might have thought their initial chances might not have been great. The Makerfield result shows that Reform might not be able to attract the broadly centrist votes that they would need to succeed at the present time.

These contests are now over and it’s time to wait until the next bunfight by-election which may occur sometime between now and the General Election date of 2029.