Labour’s soul is being laid bare in the Gorton and Denton byelection campaign. Insofar as the party’s masters have had a coherent political strategy, it is this: define Labour against the left, and compete with the right for votes. If the left is squealing or the Daily Mail is cheering, goes the thinking, Labour must be on the right track.

Being forced to compete with the left was never part of the plan. Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, “doesn’t have room for compromise with the hard left”, as a former associate put it, believing “they need to be eradicated from the party because they are so dangerous.” It’s as though the Starmerites assumed that once the left was vanquished inside Labour, it would simply vanish from politics altogether.

They did not anticipate a leftwing insurgency in the form of Zack Polanski’s Green party. In Gorton and Denton – where Labour secured half the vote in 2024 – the party is haemorrhaging support to Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK and to the Greens. But it is the Green candidate, the charismatic local plumber Hannah Spencer, who is now the bookies’ firm favourite.

That should hardly make the Greens complacent. The party has shared with me its latest doorstep data, based on 1,899 conversations in the constituency, that puts them on 34%, behind Reform........

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