A byelection has been set for February 26 in the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton. This will be a big test for Keir Starmer’s Labour party and a temperature check on the state of multi-party politics in the North. Although Labour won the seat comfortably in 2024, some early polls are already suggesting Reform could win.
Byelections are awkward beasts and don’t necessarily follow the usual rules. What makes things harder in this case is that Gorton and Denton is a new constituency. It was formed by boundary changes in 2024 from parts of three different Manchester constituencies (Gorton, Denton & Reddish and Manchester Withington).
When we try to understand what might happen in a byelection, we rely on the constituency’s past election results as a marker, which is obviously limited to just one election in this case. Gorton and Denton is also “a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster”, as my colleague Rob Ford has written.
