Josh Simons has announced he will stand down as the MP for Makerfield, setting up a byelection in the Labour-held seat and reopening a path that Andy Burnham has been chasing for months.
The seat is not an easy target for Labour to lose. The party holds Makerfield with a majority of just over 5,000, but the political significance of the vacancy goes far beyond the numbers because Burnham needs a Commons seat before he can launch any leadership challenge against Keir Starmer.
Burnham’s long-running effort to get back into parliament has already run into Starmer once this year. At the start of this year, the Labour leader blocked him from running in the Gorton and Denton byelection, and the party’s ruling national executive committee had previously stopped Burnham from being selected. Now, sources close to Starmer have suggested he may no longer be in a position to block Burnham’s return.
That shift matters because the pressure on Starmer has intensified sharply in recent days. Labour MPs reacted angrily to last week’s local and devolved election results, and around 100 MPs called for Starmer to go, leaving the prime minister’s authority badly weakened inside his own party.
A senior Burnham backer put the mood plainly, saying: “If you’ve got people from Angela [Rayner] to Wes saying it, then the whole party is now in the same place on this. Andy needs to be given a shot. He is the person that connects best with the public. It would be foolish to try to block him again.”
Makerfield now sits at the centre of a much larger struggle inside Labour. On paper, it is a winnable seat the party already holds. In practice, a byelection there could decide whether Burnham gets the chance to move from being a powerful external critic to an active Commons rival, and whether Starmer can still control the succession fight that has started to gather pace around him.
If Burnham secures the seat, the challenge to Starmer becomes immediate rather than theoretical. If he does not, Labour’s internal fight will continue without a clear parliamentary vehicle for one of the party’s most dangerous potential opponents.
