Jon Craig, chief political correspondent at Sky News and esteemed titan of broadcasting, is methodically demolishing a bag of Sainsbury’s cookies. The Raving Monster Loony Party is here too: their candidate (“Sir Oink-A-Lot”) is enjoying a hazy can of Brewdog. Another of the Loonies walks into a mirror in the bathroom thinking it was the exit. Oink-A-Lot smells like the bottom of an old pint glass. Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, has more pressing matters to attend to, like preparing to concede a humiliating defeat for her party.
It’s a little past midnight. Rosetted councillors have been running samples of the votes back to a table where Powell sits, alongside a campaigner who’s plugging them into a laptop. With each return visit their shoulders slump further, their smiles grow tighter. When we ask one sampler how it’s going — journalists are often treated like lepers during the sampling process and given a wide berth — they simply say: “it’s… yeah.”
Powell's concession on the night was almost formality. Her party as good as conceded defeat almost a month ago when Andy Burnham, the only man who might have stood a chance in such difficult circumstances — with a large Muslim vote in the seat still angry at the government over Gaza, the Prime Minister’s flailing personal reputation and the impressive communication skills of Green candidate Hannah Spencer — was blocked from contesting.
It was a result, in the words of Green Party leader Zack Polanski, which “tore the roof off” British politics. In the final count, his party won 14,980 votes, well above Reform’s second-placed total of 10,578. Labour languished in third. Not even the Greens were bothering to pretend they expected to win by such a margin. “We’re as amazed as anyone,” says one organiser from the party, describing the atmosphere in the room when the result was read out as “pure shock…and amazement”. He adds: “Of course, we thought we had a path to eek out a narrow win. But not this”. Videos posted online after the fact showed more than shock: like this one at Niamos of one Green activist crowd-surfing.
The organiser tells me the local party was planning to win an MP in the “next few years”, for now focusing on upcoming council elections. Even the plan for those local elections will now need redrafting. “A lot of our strategy was geared around Moss Side, Hulme, Rusholme, and those types of places,” he says. “But now we’ve won in Gorton and Denton it’s natural that we’re going to want to start targeting those wards for councillors. Places like Burnage.”
On the morning after the big night, no one has slept. Matt Goodwin is busy telling people why he lost (“a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives”). Sir Keir Starmer is busy telling people why he shouldn’t resign (the Greens won’t be able to replicate this across the country, he says), while the Greens are readying themselves — presumably stoked by industrial quantities of Red Bull — for a day of planned activities and merriment: a walk around the constituency and a community lunch. Spencer, we’re told, did go back to bed for a couple of hours at some point — but didn’t sleep.
At Longsight Community Art Space, where Spencer is meeting constituents, we get chatting to Cindylou Turner-Taylor, a 65-year-old Green campaigner in Manchester, who tells us she’s now the oldest person on the party’s regular campaign team (a team well-known for their younger activists). “It used to just be people with grey hair,” she laughs. For Turner-Taylor, this is a joyful moment. “For local people it’s about believing in politics again. We had a consistent message and it was hopeful, joyful and positive.”
Whatever skills Hannah Spencer possesses for political organising, though, she manifestly lacks when it comes to karaoke organising. At the Create Connect Community Centre in Denton, where a karaoke session has been promised, the CEO is baffled to find a thronging press-pack gathered outside, waiting to see the new MP for Gorton and Denton attack Shania Twain’s Man I Feel Like a Woman (this, Spencer later tells the room, is her go-to at the mic). She thought Spencer was just “popping in” for a song and had no idea the media, including a TV channel from Belgium, would suddenly appear at her doorstep. Moments after Spencer arrives, one of her aides comes shuffling sheepishly towards us and delivers the four least celebratory words in the English language: “the karaoke is off”.
With the karaoke cancelled, an impromptu photo-taking session is set up, a meagre compromise in the eyes of one journalist (“we’re here because she’s meant to be singing karaoke”, they lament). Most of the press disappears into the Denton drizzle. We grab Spencer for a quick chat, and she explains her belief that a positive message helped her carve out such a chunky slab of the vote in an otherwise divided constituency. “I keep saying everyone has a lot in common…Even if their struggles have been different at different times in their life…People here are so caring. They do a lot for each other.”
For a party that just won a historic victory, the tone in the Green camp is amazingly measured. There’s little revolutionary chatter among the sources The Mill manages to collar. “We’re yet to see how much of a change there will be over the next few years,” one organiser tells us when asked if the Greens can become a serious threat at council-level to Manchester’s Labour party in the foreseeable. “In the next few years our aim is to become the main opposition in the council”.
Perhaps this is the right attitude looking ahead to May, when Manchester will hold elections on a third of its councillors. The city has been Labour-controlled since 1973. There’s certainly little danger of that changing soon, but such is the unpopularity of the government that it’s worth asking whether a Green, or indeed Reform, version of the Lib Dem march in the early 2000s following the Iraq War, is replicable.
At the community centre, the BBC asks if Spencer suspects she’d have won had Andy Burnham been allowed to stand. Again, the response is measured, not bombastic. “You know, I don’t know,” she says. “If you’d have asked me that at the beginning of the campaign I might’ve said ‘probably not’. But as time’s gone on, seeing how angry people are about Labour, I couldn’t say’”. In fact, it’s considerably more measured than the response Zack Polanski gave when we asked him the same question a couple of weeks ago. He told us he thinks Andy Burnham is a popular figure, “but I don’t think he ever stood a chance”.
The election of a Green MP sends a message to voters across Manchester, in the build-up to a general election, that there is now another option. For at least the last decade, every constituency bordering the city of Manchester has had a Labour MP. These nine MPs have slotted perfectly into the local political machinery, under the control of the Manchester Labour Group. With Spencer now in Gorton and Denton, it means there is a section of the city not only lacking a compliant Labour figure, but with one who will actively fight the party.
In Spencer’s victory speech on the night of her win, which was backdropped by the spectre of Matt Goodwin’s melodramatically shaking head, she said her team had run a positive campaign. She told the room she hadn’t grown up wanting to be a politician, she only wanted to be a plumber. She’ll have to get used to it now.
While we made all of our by-election coverage free, that doesn't mean it was free to produce. Our journalists were out with the candidates, and speaking to voters, critics, supporters, gossipers and everybody in between to try and give you the best sense of what went down in Gorton and Denton.
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