Having romped into third place in Gorton and Denton, Labour is celebrating its success with a word salad | Marina Hyde

6 hours ago 4

As David Lammy put it on Thursday in a dispatch from Gorton and Denton: “Only Labour can stop Reform.” And listen, stopping them by taking third place and haemorrhaging half your support from a general election that took place 19 months ago in an area where you haven’t lost an election for almost 100 years is definitely an intriguing way to do it.

Only the Tories sound more furniture-munchingly insane after the Green win last night, announcing the result shows that “only the Conservatives have the experience, the plans and the team to ensure a stronger economy and a stronger country”. Guys? Your candidate LOST THEIR DEPOSIT. Your candidate pulled in the worst ever English byelection result in Conservative party history. This is a bit like the German military surfacing the morning after Operation Bagration in 1944, surveying the wreckage of the eastern front and declaring: “Lads, we’ve got this. Trust the process!”

But look, enough of happier times. And certainly, enough of the comfortable old saw that elections are won on the centre ground. British politics now has no centre, like a Möbius strip or Earth’s worst city (Los Angeles). The Green leader, Zack Polanski, announced on Friday morning that this victory “could transform the face of” UK politics. But could it make its boobs bigger just using its mind? Definitely a question going into the May local elections campaign.

In terms of legacy projects, meanwhile, you’d think that in the timeframe left to him, Keir Starmer could probably pull off a couple of floating shelves in the No 10 kitchen, or possibly an accent wall. The prime minister was, of course, extremely intent on preventing wantaway Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton, a decision Starmer will doubtless have time to reflect on both now and in his post-office years narcotising the after-dinner circuit and acting nobly against the UK in the service of his ultimate deity: international law. A month ago, Labour’s general secretary, Hollie Ridley, dismissed the idea the Greens could win in Gorton and Denton as “bollocks”, and earlier this week expanded that “the Green party are clearly high on the class-A drugs they want to legalise if they think they’re in this race”. We haven’t heard from Hollie today, and must assume she’s on some kind of brutal psephological comedown.

If you thought this byelection campaign was toxic and dishonourable, you’re going to love the aftermath. Even the beneficiaries of the fracturing of the two-party system are on the warpath, with Nigel Farage not waiting to turn concerning allegations about family voting into concerning facts, and thundering: “This election was a victory for sectarian voting and cheating.”

What it wasn’t was a victory for the Reform UK candidate, Matthew Goodwin. The Reform chair, David Bull, as a former presenter of the paranormal reality TV show Most Haunted Live!, once had to moderate for a studio audience the ravings of total charlatan/sensitive spirit medium Derek Acorah – and there was something of this vibe to his smiling drive-by on Goodwin this morning. Sky News asked him whether Reform’s push had been hurt by Goodwin suggesting that people born in Britain aren’t necessarily British. “He is an academic,” Bull smiled acidly, as though the occupation “academic” were on a par with “serial sex murderer” or even “YouTube parent”. “I think it’s fair to say he made some ‘interesting’ comments which I have had some discussions with him about.” Or as Goodwin claimed as the polls closed: “We are not a political party. We are a movement and a family.”

Faced with the possibility of calling for her own resignation or Starmer’s, meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch has gone for the PM’s – judging him to be “in office but not in power”. Kemi, of course, is neither in office nor in power and, on the basis of Thursday’s historic flame-out and much else, is likely to find May’s local elections almost as definitive as Starmer.

As for Labour … by now you will have learned from bitter experience that the only sane answer to Labour figures wailing in the aftermath of a setback that the leadership has been pursuing the wrong strategy is: wait, there’s been a strategy?! Even now, most Labour lieutenants are only capable of speaking in mad politician language, that bonkers argot they can’t seem to unlearn no matter how many times today’s voters here and around the world show them that it’s a turn-off. This morning, the Labour deputy leader, Lucy Powell, seemed to think the British public had ordered the word salad for breakfast. “What I take from it,” she said of the byelection result, “is that people want to see the Labour party, the Labour government, shouting more loudly about our values, about our story.” Shouting about a story? No human talks like this. What does this mean? You heard a lot during the campaign about leaflets printed in Urdu or Bangla; I would also like all leaflets/interviews in this weirdo politicians’ dialect to be something we just don’t do in British politics.

Fronting up for the cameras, alas, Starmer himself showed no sign of fluency in anything else, let alone a sense that he had absorbed the lessons of the night. These days, the prime minister talks so frequently about “fighting”, and with such little result, that it’s starting to feel counterintuitively possible that his position may be improved by going limp instead. One for Labour’s master strategists to consider, perhaps, given that it is now undeniably clear the party will have to fight simultaneously on two fronts in May. Not to bring it all back to Operation Bagration, obviously.