The British PM’s Labour Party came in third place in a constituency it’s held since the 1930s
The UK’s Labour Party has lost a parliamentary seat it had held for almost a century to the Green Party in an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Labour is projected to lose more seats in upcoming local elections.
The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer won Thursday’s Gorton and Denton by-election with 40.7% of the vote, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK coming in second with 28.7%, and Labour finishing third with 25.4%, according to results announced on Friday morning.
The result is a striking upset for Starmer. Labour has held Gorton and Denton – a constituency located in the Greater Manchester area – since 1935, and won more than half of the vote there in 2024.
Labour won a 174-seat majority in 2024’s general election, sweeping Starmer into office in the party’s third-best election in its history. Now, the initial wave of good will toward the prime minister has evaporated.
Starmer’s approval rating now sits at -57%, the lowest of any prime minister in history except the Conservatives’ Liz Truss, according to polling by YouGov. The prime minister has been hammered by the right for his failure to stop the flow of migrant boats into the UK and for his crackdown on online “hate speech,” while all sides of the political spectrum have condemned his failure to tackle the UK’s cost of living crisis, and his appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.
Mandelson, who received $75,000 in unexplained payments from Jeffrey Epstein, was arrested this week for allegedly having leaked state secrets to the deceased pedophile.
The second-place result in Gorton and Denton also came as a disappointment to Reform, which has capitalized on public anger over mass immigration to become the UK’s most popular party, according to an aggregate of opinion polls compiled by Politico.
Reform candidate Matt Goodwin partially blamed his relatively poor result on “Muslim sectarianism,” alleging that Muslims – who make up more than 30% of the population in Gorton and Denton – illegally entered polling booths together to vote for the Greens. Democracy Volunteers, an accredited poll-watching organization, claims that it noticed incidences of this “family voting” at 68% of polling stations across the constituency.
Labour is predicted to lose thousands of council seats when Britons go to the polls to vote in local elections on May 7.
