This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

As an old American political joke goes, if you see two men punching each other in the street, one shouting “traitor” and the other “liar”, you know you are in the presence of people trying to unite the Democratic Party.

Much the same could be said of the Labour Party, with its history of fratricidal conflict between its right and left wings, strife that intensified in 2015 and 2016 with Jeremy Corbyn elected as Labour leader and divisions over the Brexit referendum. After his general election victory in 2024, Sir Keir Starmer ran the party very much from the right, provoking a mass defection of Labour voters to the Greens, but without denting the Reform vote.

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” said Dr Samuel Johnson, a saying appropriate to Labour after its calamitous performance in the local and devolved elections on 7 May. As Labour MPs saw the electoral noose tightening around their necks, the obstacles blocking the return of the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, to the House of Commons – so huge and insurmountable a few days earlier – magically evaporated. The prospect of political extinction is proving a great energiser, as several Labour leaders on the right and left of the party clear Burnham’s way to succeed Starmer and lead a successful counter-attack against Nigel Farage and Reform.

Standing in a by-election in Makerfield, where Reform swept the board in the local elections, is probably less risky than it looks for Burnham, given that the horde of journalists who have descended on the constituency appear to be having difficulty finding anybody who said they might vote against Burnham. The by-election provides him with an ideal opportunity to show that he can win where Starmer lost. There is enough at stake to guarantee maximum media and public interest in what is billed as gladiatorial combat between Labour’s new champion and Reform.

The by-election will be the test as to whether Labour can hope to reverse the right-wing rip tide sweeping Britain towards its own version of Trumpism. Removing Starmer, with his genius for self-sabotage, may help his successor, bearing in mind that a canny political operator like Farage fought the local election under the slogan “Vote Reform. Get Starmer Out”. Reform – like other populist parties – portrays itself as a party “on our side” and not part of a remote elite. Burnham can credibly play the same dubious card, taking advantage of his self-exile from Westminster.

A poll by YouGov on behalf of the Persuasion UK shows that in the local elections the largest defection by 2024 Labour voters was to the Greens and Lib Dems, but some 57 per cent of these say they would return if Labour had a more progressive agenda. Only 11 per cent of those who defected to Reform and the Conservatives were willing to go back. With typical cack-handedness, Starmer has veered ineffectually right and left, attacking Reform one day and the Greens the next. Only a Labour government that can credibly present itself as the best vehicle to stop Reform will........

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