Some political turning points announce themselves immediately. This one took a few days to be understood for what it was. When Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with close to 25,000 votes — roughly 55% of the vote in a seat deliberately vacated so he could contest it — the immediate coverage treated it as a strong result for Labour against a Reform UK surge that had battered the party in the May 2026 local elections. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, on The Rest Is Politics, argued something considerably more consequential was actually happening: this was, in effect, the moment that made Keir Starmer\'s departure inevitable, even though almost nobody said so explicitly at the time.
Their analysis is worth revisiting now, weeks later, because it correctly anticipated a chain of events — Starmer\'s resignation, Burnham\'s emergence as his near-certain successor — that has since played out almost exactly as they described it in real time.
A Win That Was Actually an Application
Campbell\'s framing was blunt: this thumping victory, in an area where Reform UK had battered Labour in the May local elections just weeks earlier, was in effect “Andy Burnham\'s application to the Labour Party to oust” Starmer and take Downing Street instead. The mechanics behind the by-election reinforce that reading: Makerfield MP Josh Simons resigned specifically to open the seat for Burnham, a manoeuvre that only makes sense if the underlying goal was always a leadership bid rather than simply strengthening a backbench voice.
The Peter Hyman Framing That Stuck
The most quoted line from this episode, cited constantly by Labour figures in the weeks since, came from former Blair strategist Peter Hyman\'s analysis of the moment, which Campbell read aloud: “Where Farage offers victimhood, Burnham is offering agency. Where Farage offers scapegoats, Burnham is offering common purpose. Where Farage offers a return to the past, Burnham is offering hope for a better future.” It crystallised something both hosts had been circling around: that Labour\'s central problem under Starmer was never really about policy competence in isolation, but about the absence of a clear story that could compete emotionally with the one Nigel Farage and Reform UK had been telling for two years.
Who Should Be Chancellor?
Even at this early stage, weeks before Starmer\'s formal resignation, Campbell and Stewart were already speculating about who Burnham would need at the Treasury to make his devolution-heavy platform credible. Campbell\'s prediction, made well before it became a mainstream talking point, was that Ed Miliband would be the right choice specifically because of his experience fighting Treasury orthodoxy under Gordon Brown, and because his record on the climate portfolio showed he could hold difficult positions under pressure — a preview of exactly the appointment speculation that would dominate Westminster coverage once Burnham\'s succession became formally confirmed.
What This Means Going Forward
Looking back at this episode from the vantage point of Burnham\'s now near-certain arrival in Downing Street, its real value is not that it predicted an outcome — plenty of commentators eventually reached the same conclusion — but that it identified the mechanism weeks before the resignation itself: a mayor engineering his own return to Westminster through a by-election victory large enough to make the leadership question unavoidable. For anyone trying to understand how a sitting prime minister with a landslide majority ended up forced out within two years, this is close to where the story actually begins.