Labour Held Starmer’s Old Seat; Nobody Won It

Paul Knaggs writes:

Keir Starmer left Holborn and St Pancras with a majority of 11,572. Labour has just kept it with 3,364. Six voters in ten did not turn out at all. That is not a mandate. It is a tenancy, which is at least appropriate in a constituency where roughly three quarters of residents rent the roof over their heads.

Sagal Abdi-Wali, leader of Camden Council since May and a former child refugee from Somalia, won with 12,292 votes. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, took 8,928. Ewan Cameron of the Conservatives came third on 1,922, Reform’s Peter Newman fourth on 1,612, and the Liberal Democrat Patrick Stillman trailed on 924. Turnout was 38.76 per cent, down from 54.1 per cent when Starmer last stood here two years ago.

Let me be fair to the Greens before I am hard on them, because the arithmetic deserves honesty. In 2024 their candidate David Stansell polled 4,030 votes in this seat. Polanski took more than double that on a turnout around eleven thousand votes lower. In share terms that is close to a tripling. A Green spokesperson said on the night that taking the fight to Labour in one of its safest seats showed how far the party has come, and on the face of the numbers that is not spin. In February the Greens took Gorton and Denton from Labour outright, with Hannah Spencer winning on a turnout of 47.62 per cent.

This is a party that is genuinely growing. That is precisely why last night was so bad for them. Gorton and Denton was a seat the Greens chose to fight. Holborn and St Pancras was a seat their leader chose to inhabit. Polanski did not send a promising local candidate into Camden and hope. He put his own name on the ballot, moved the national operation in behind it, and told the press in September that he would remain leader whatever happened. Nearly fifteen hundred doors were knocked in the first three days after Starmer’s resignation, before the party had even selected anybody. When you stake your personal authority on a contest, you do not get to grade yourself on vote share afterwards. When you stake your personal authority on a contest, you do not get to grade yourself on vote share afterwards.

And there is a number that should trouble Green strategists more than Abdi-Wali’s majority. In 2024, the independent Andrew Feinstein took 7,312 votes here with no party, no machine and no national profile beyond his own. Stansell took a further 4,030. Between them, the anti-Starmer left polled 11,342 in this constituency. Polanski, as leader of a national party in a by-election built around him, polled 8,928. Turnout was far lower, so the comparison is not a straight one. But a movement that absorbed Feinstein’s endorsement and Feinstein’s voters and still could not assemble Feinstein’s coalition has a problem it cannot solve with leaflets.

WHAT HAPPENED IN BRIGHTON 

The problem has a date and a place. On Saturday 4 October, at the Green conference in Brighton, members voted by 1,022 to 813 to adopt a motion declaring Zionism a racist, ethnonationalist political project, committing the party to a single democratic state and formally making the Greens the first explicitly anti-Zionist party in mainstream British politics. Fifty-five per cent to forty-five. A party split nearly down the middle, on the eve of the most important by-election in its history.

Polanski was not in the hall. He had left after his Friday speech to campaign in Camden. He had backed an amendment offering safeguards for Jewish members, and that amendment was defeated, but he did not stay to speak against the motion and he did not vote on it. Caroline Lucas, who led the party from 2016 to 2018 and remains its most recognisable figure, went on Newsnight and did not spare him. She said he should have been there and he should have voted. She called the motion flawed from top to bottom.

Asked directly whether Polanski should quit the leadership, she declined to defend him, saying instead that we should see what happens in the coming days and weeks, while allowing that he had been taken up with the by-election. Read that again. That is not criticism from an opponent. That is a former leader of the same party, invited on live television to say her leader should stay, choosing not to.

THE ARGUMENT THE GREENS DID NOT HAVE 

Here is the defence the Greens will offer, and it is not a stupid one. Party conference is sovereign. Members, not leaders, make policy, and a leader who overrides a membership vote is a leader of a different kind of party. The motion carries no disciplinary weight, as the party’s own spokesperson pointed out. Polanski was doing the job the membership had given him, which was to fight an election. There is something honourable in a party that argues in public rather than managing dissent in private, and anyone who watched Labour’s internal machinery grind through the Corbyn years should hesitate before demanding more discipline and less democracy. All true.

And all beside the point. The question was never whether Green members have the right to debate Israel and Palestine. They do. The question is what a party is for, and what it puts first when the two collide. In the week the Greens had their best ever shot at a Westminster seat, in a constituency where people are being priced out of the streets they grew up on, the party’s defining public act was a motion about the Middle East that split its own conference almost in half and that its leader was too busy to vote on. 

Abdi-Wali, for her part, campaigned on the thing in front of her. She pointed out that around 76 per cent of people in this seat rent, against a national average nearer 36. She was not an inspiring choice, and plenty on the local left regard her as thoroughly Starmerite. She did not turn up to the Camden Muslim Network hustings, and the organisers noticed. Her party’s vote fell by 6,592 from Starmer’s 2024 total. She won anyway, because she talked about rent.

BOUNDARIES 

This is the party that tells you to follow the science, right up until the science contradicts the Party Something has happened to the Green Party, and the Zionism motion is a symptom rather than the disease. This was once a movement that understood boundaries as a physical fact. A watershed. A green belt. A hedgerow. A limit on how much a river can take before it dies. Its whole claim on our attention was that some things must be protected whether or not protecting them is fashionable. That instinct has not disappeared, but it has been displaced. A party that built itself on defending the boundaries of the natural world has become notably less patient with boundaries elsewhere, including the ones women ask for around privacy, dignity and single-sex space.

This newspaper’s position on that is settled and will not be softened to keep anyone comfortable. Somewhere between saving the planet and relitigating the meaning of sex, the Greens wandered into territory where the people they most need to persuade cannot follow them. Polanski should not be hounded out over one defeat. He doubled his party’s vote in a Labour fortress and that is a real achievement, whatever happens next. But he set the test himself, and he failed it, and he was absent from the room where the damage was done.

THE TEMPTATION IN DOWNING STREET 

There is a man in Downing Street who should read this result more carefully than anyone in the Green Party, and his name is Andy Burnham. Burnham has been Prime Minister since 20 July. He was acclaimed unopposed, which is to say that not a single Labour member, let alone a single voter, was asked to endorse him. He entered the Commons in June through a by-election in Makerfield that existed only because Josh Simons stood aside to create it. He is the seventh person to hold the office in just over a decade. He has never led a party into a general election, and the next one is not due until August 2029.

So far, that has not hurt him. Survation’s poll of 2 to 5 October put Labour on 30 per cent against Reform’s 24, the party’s best figure since December 2024 and the third Labour lead of Burnham’s premiership outside the margin of error. His personal numbers are the sort no British prime minister has enjoyed in years: Opinium had him at net plus seven in late September, YouGov at plus five. The press has already given it a name. The Burnham bounce.

Every instinct in Labour’s machine will now whisper the same thing. Go now. Convert the bounce into a mandate before the Budget, before the winter, before the shine comes off. Holborn and St Pancras is the reason not to.  Look at what actually happened in a seat Labour held by 11,572 two years ago. The party’s vote fell by 6,592. The majority fell to 3,364. Starmer’s successor won, and won fairly, but she won by surviving rather than persuading. And the damage was not done by the right. The Conservatives went backwards here in raw votes. So did Reform. So did the Liberal Democrats. Everything Labour lost in this constituency, it lost leftwards.

That is the part that should keep Burnham awake, because it is the mirror image of the thing that got him here. Tim Bale of Queen Mary University put it plainly to Al Jazeera last week: very little of Labour’s recovery comes from Reform voters switching to Labour. The bounce is built on left-leaning and liberal voters coming home. Those are precisely the voters Polanski spent five weeks in Camden trying to take away, and he took 8,928 of them.

Now set that against the arithmetic of 2024. Labour won 411 seats on 33.7 per cent of the vote, the most efficient and the shallowest landslide in modern British history. A majority of that size built on a third of the vote does not degrade gently. It holds, and holds, and then it collapses all at once, because hundreds of seats sit within a few thousand votes of changing hands. Labour is currently polling between 28 and 30 per cent. In February, the Greens took Gorton and Denton from Labour on a swing large enough to rank among the biggest Labour by-election losses since 1931. In Makerfield, Reform’s candidate still polled 15,696 votes while losing. Burnham cannot squeeze the Green vote by moving right, and he cannot hold off Reform by moving left. Two fronts, pulling in opposite directions. There is no campaign clever enough to solve that in six weeks, which is all a general election gives you. The honest case for going early is that legitimacy is a real problem, that an unelected prime minister governing on another man’s manifesto has limited authority, and that the bounce may never be higher than it is this month. All fair.

But a general election called to settle a legitimacy question of your own making is not a mandate, it is a gamble with other people’s livelihoods as the stake. Burnham has nearly three years. The question is not whether he can win an election now. It is whether he can give people a reason to vote for him in 2029, and that reason will not be found in a poll. It will be found in rent, in bills, in water, in buses, in the things he spent nine years in Manchester saying a government ought to be judged on. He has the one thing Starmer never had, which is permission. He should spend it on something. The Greens did not lose Holborn and St Pancras to Labour. They lost it in Brighton, in a hall their leader had already left.

Assisted Suicide By The Back Door

Dr Anthony McCarthy writes:

The anthropologist Mary Douglas once noted of taboos: ‘Without the taboos, which turn basic classifications into automatic psychological reflexes, no thinking could be effective, because if every system of classification was up for revision at every moment, there would be no stability of thought.’

The taboo on suicide in our culture is powerful enough that promoters of the recently defeated Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill claimed that it was not concerned with ‘suicide’. The rich dishonesty of that stance was revealed when they sought to amend the Suicide Act of 1961 so that ‘assisting a person to seek to end their own life in accordance with the act’ would not fall foul of the prohibition on assisting suicide. The bill fell apart under scrutiny as the House of Lords, the House of Commons and, before that, medical royal colleges and disability groups – among others – showed it to be bad and dangerous legislation.

Yet, less than a month before the defeat of the bill, the British Medical Association (BMA) issued guidance clearly promoting the idea that doctors should assist in the suicide (here, suicide by omission) of patients under their care, whatever parliament may decide on ‘assisted dying’. As with the bill, the BMA’s guidance doesn’t use the word ‘suicide’ except to claim that what it proposes is not ‘assisting in suicide’ according to the law.

The BMA’s guidance is aimed at those ‘caring for patients who elect to voluntarily stop eating and drinking (VSED)’. It concerns specifically patients who ‘with the mental capacity to decide to do so, and in the absence of control or coercion, [make] an informed decision to stop the oral intake of food and fluids with the intention to end their life’. The guidance cannot bring itself to call such decisions ‘suicidal’, even though suicide is precisely the decision to end one’s life, by whatever means.

So what does the BMA recommend? It appeared to have as much difficulty with the term ‘assisting’ as it does with ‘suicide’. Repeatedly throughout its guidance, the BMA assures its members that whatever they are recommending, it is not assistance in suicide – not legally, at least.

Doctors are merely giving ‘information’, the BMA claims. But this ‘information’ includes tips on altering a patient’s diet in preparation for starvation or fatal dehydration. It instructs relatives not to offer food, and tells doctors what to do if one asks for food and water when delirious, and so on. In other words, doctors are actively encouraged to advise suicidal patients on how to prepare for and carry out their suicidal plan most comfortably, as with ‘decreasing caloric intake one week before’. Perhaps one day those intent on drowning themselves will be offered handy advice on overcoming hydrophobia as part of their ‘care’.

Faced with a suicidal person determined to starve and dehydrate themselves to death, the BMA tells its members that doctors should not ‘judge or try to persuade the patient to change their decision, and patients should not be put in a position where they are forced to justify or defend it’.

But doctors don’t simply exist to facilitate a patient’s wishes. In fact, doctors are forever persuading people to live healthier lifestyles, sometimes to an intrusive degree. Yet when it comes to those wanting to take the ultimate, irreversible decision against their life and health – the very values that make sense of the doctor’s profession – a suicidal decision is seemingly so sacrosanct that a doctor should in no way even try to persuade the patient to see life differently. There was a reason Hippocrates took it as paradigmatic of medicine that doctors should not use their skills to further a death wish of their patients.

According to the BMA, so sacrosanct are suicidal desires in this context that ‘conversations with family and friends to ensure that they understand the care plan and the patient’s desires may help to mitigate any deviations from the care plan not agreed to by the patient. This may be especially important if the patient elects to VSED at home.’

Heaven forbid that the family and friends of the suicidal patient might want to ‘persuade’ their loved one not to kill themselves, and that there be some ‘deviation’ from their plan for self-termination. The doctor, whose privileges derive precisely from caring for life and health, is here helping shield the patient from family and friends who may care for such things more than the doctor.

The BMA admits that doing so ‘may be difficult for doctors and healthcare professionals, ancillary staff, and families, as they instinctively want to care for their patients and loved ones’. It adds that offering ‘food and/or fluids to patients is usually good practice but this may not be regarded in the same way when the patient has elected to VSED.’ So ‘good practice’ no longer applies, and those wholesome instincts of care exhibited by health care workers and ‘loved ones’ must be suppressed.

Even the suicidal patient’s ‘request to drink or eat’ may, we are told, be ‘due to symptoms of thirst or hunger, rather than a genuine desire to reintroduce food and/or fluids to stop or prolong the process of VSED’. Faced with a patient begging for food or drink, the doctor is not to provide ordinary basic care immediately as a matter of course, but should rather weigh such requests against what the doctor thinks the patient ‘really wanted’ in light of earlier suicidal wishes.

Won’t all this bring about a terrible toll on doctors? A doctor who went into the profession to heal and care for fellow human beings, and is now assisting in the starvation and dehydration of a patient, may perhaps feel significant inner turmoil.

Fortunately, the BMA is on hand to acknowledge, in the tone of a tick-box commissar, that the ‘concepts of moral distress and moral injury may have salience here’.

Finally, lest any doctor be in any way unclear how to act, the BMA guidance helpfully suggests some examples of behaviour that must be prohibited:

‘When a patient has agreed to being offered food and / or fluids, doctors should not: attempt to entice them to change their minds about VSED, for example, by bringing in ice cream on a hot day; bring trays of food or glasses of liquid in front of them several times a day; repeatedly, and outside of the agreed upon intervals, ask them if they want to eat or drink; or purposefully prescribe medicines that need to be taken orally with liquids or food.’

Perhaps instead of giving dire warnings to doctors about the dangers of offering ice cream to a starving and suicidal patient on a hot day, the British Medical Association should revisit the foundational values of the profession. Recovery of some basic Hippocratic principles in this area might bring back some ‘stability of thought’ to an institution where it is strikingly lacking.

Catholicus

On this feast of Saint John Henry Newman, David Coates writes:

In February 1841 a series of letters entitled “The Tamworth Reading-Room” appeared in The Times, attributed to “Catholicus”. This nom de guerre was the pseudonym of John Henry Newman, at that time one of the heads of the “Tractarian” movement of the Church of England.

For eight years Newman had been publishing and editing the Tracts for the Times, in which he and his collaborators sought to recover and revitalise the Catholic character of the Anglican Church. Hostile both to the errors of Protestantism and to what they believed to be the “corruptions” of the Roman system, the Tractarians asserted that Anglican theology held to a “via media” which successfully preserved the doctrines of the primitive church. Yet it was precisely Newman’s study of the primitive church during the summer of 1839 which undermined his confidence, as his analysis of the Monophysite controversy during the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century demonstrated that the primitive church had never appealed to any “via media” but had always defended orthodoxy. This revelation shattered Newman, and by 1841 he was “on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church”.

“The Tamworth Reading-Room” was one of the last controversial works Newman published whilst an Anglican, and it is distinct from his other publications of this period in that it is not concerned with theological disputes between different communions. Instead, the letters assert the fundamental importance of religion in education in a manner which was intended to be acceptable to Christians of all denominations.

Newman was provoked to publication by a speech by Sir Robert Peel inaugurating the opening of a library and reading room in his constituency of Tamworth. Peel had been a source of irritation for Newman since the late 1820s, when he was still the MP for Oxford University and had reversed his earlier opposition to Catholic emancipation; Newman regarded this as a typical example of Peelite conservatism, which could always be relied on to swallow the opinions and the presumptions of its liberal opponents after a few years fruitlessly opposing them. The critique which the heart of the Tory Party would later make of Peel following his reversal of opinion in the Corn Laws crisis of 1846 was already developed by Newman in 1841.

Newman’s basic critique of Peel’s speech was that it was identical in content to the defences of secular and utilitarian education which the Whig Lord Brougham had been promoting for the previous 15 years, and that if an unknowing reader were to “take it up without looking at the heading, he would to a certainty set it down as a production of the years 1827 and 1828 – the scene Gower Street, the speaker Mr Brougham or Dr Lushington, and the occasion, the laying the first stone, or the inauguration, of the then-called London University”. Newman recognised that, unlike Brougham, Peel understood the importance of religion, but that Peel’s belief that religion could be derived from science was fallacious.

During Peel’s opening address he had asserted that discussions of religious controversy ought to be excluded from the Reading Room, but that a greater knowledge of the physical sciences would improve man’s moral condition. It wasn’t that Peel sought to exclude religion, but that he believed that “an increased sagacity will… make men… better qualified to comprehend the great scheme of human redemption”, and that familiarity with science should lead to “more enlarged conceptions of God’s providence, and a higher reverence for His name”. For Newman, this was to misunderstand the core differences between these two activities. As he was later to assert in The Idea of a University, “Induction is the instrument of Physics, and deduction only is the instrument of Theology.” The former uncovers facts and seeks to arrive at conclusions about them; the latter begins from revelation and seeks to deduce consequences.

Newman was entirely dismissive of Peel’s suggestion that a knowledge of science could improve a man’s moral character. He attacked the assumption that virtue was to be founded in knowledge, or vice in ignorance. Ethics derives from faith, and faith operates on man in his fullness, not simply on his rational faculties: “Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion… No one, I say, will die for his own calculations; he dies for realities.”

Contained within “The Tamworth Reading-Room” is an early anticipation of the phenomenology of belief which Newman would develop at such great length and with such precision in his late masterpiece, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). He asserts the need for belief to speak to the heart of man, not simply his head. It is imagination and description which is the spring of action, and not reason. “After all,” Newman asserts, “man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise. It is very well to freshen our impressions and convictions from physics, but to create them we must go elsewhere.”

This is not to deny the importance of human reason, nor of the enormous benefits which can derive from a study of the natural sciences. Newman recognises that scientific pursuits are “intrinsically excellent and noble… worthy of a place in a liberal education, and fruitful in temporal benefits to the community”, yet he asserts that no ethical doctrines can be derived from them: they offer neither consolation nor motivation. “The material world, indeed, is infinitely more wonderful than any human contrivance; but wonder is not religion, or we should be worshipping our railroads.”

Newman anticipates the danger of “scientism”, instead presenting a pedagogy which has religious truth at its core. All scientific knowledge is useful and worth pursuing for its own sake, but one should never mistake intellectual cultivation for moral instruction. A decade later, as president and rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, Newman was able to apply his theories, developing a faculty dedicated to all the branches of human knowledge, but which had theology at its core.

The final letter in “The Tamworth Reading-Room” was published on February 27. On that date Tract 90, the final production from the Tracts for the Times, was also published. Tract 90 attempted the impossible: a hopeless effort to provide an interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England which would be consistent with Catholic teaching. He was condemned by his own bishops and obliged to cease publishing on matters of religious controversy.

Two years later, in February 1843, he would publish a retraction of his hostile comments towards the Roman Catholic Church, and later that year resigned his living. Received into the Church in 1845, it was on November 1, 2025 that the Anglican parson who had once published under the name “Catholicus” would finally be recognised by Pope Leo XIV as the 38th Doctor of the Church.

Safety and Security

Reform UK "investigated" Dan Jukes and James Orr, and it magically cleared them. Anyone who welcomed that should welcome the Green Party's internal exoneration of Lubna Speitan, which ought to happen on the principle that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.

Five days after the Green Party conference vote on Zionism, no broadcaster has been able to find a Palestinian to interview. But far from downgrading the British Consulate General in Jerusalem, which is 188 years older than the State of Israel in which it has never been located, that mission should have been upgraded to the British Embassy to the British-recognised State of Palestine. It still should be.

As has been the case for over a year, the United Kingdom recognises Palestine as a sovereign state. That state is at peace with His Majesty, and the State of Israel is at war with it. Enlistment by a British citizen in the Israeli Defense Forces is therefore a criminal offence under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870. Any policy of not prosecuting dual nationals who had been conscripted would still not be the law, and anyone else would be bang to rights. Or do we have two-tier justice?

The unrealistic people are the proponents of a two-state solution, the borders of which will never be agreed. Ultimately, the only viable option is a single democratic and nonracial state at least from the River to the Sea if not throughout the former British Mandate, with constitutional rights, including the right of all of its citizens to live anywhere on its territory, upheld by an independent judiciary and by vigorously free media. That is undeniably remote now. But so what?

Spiritual Readiness

Harold Wilson’s only ever Secretary of State for Scotland was Willie Ross. A staunch opponent both of devolution and of EEC membership, Ross was no liberal. He tried to ban ITV from carrying advertisements on Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday. And in 1969, he suggested that if the death penalty were to be retained, then executions ought to be carried out on television. That unanswerable line shocked a number of waverers into the Aye Lobby to make permanent the 1965 suspension of capital punishment, a measure that there has never been any serious attempt to reverse, nor any at all since 1994.

By the starkest contrast, Pete Hegseth, he of the Jerusalem Cross tattoo and of the Office of Religious Affairs, has decreed that the execution by firing squad of Dr Nidal Hasan is to be livestreamed from Fort Hood. Thank goodness that the seventh arrestee in the case of the now abandoned USAF Fairford has been bailed like the first six and therefore cannot be a suspected terrorist. And as for the two “Latvians” at USAF Molesworth, trespass is a civil matter. You can be arrested only for aggravated trespass, and for that you need to be obstructing or deterring a lawful activity, or intimidating people so as to deter them from engaging in it. Coming into force in 1994 as part of the Act that the last of the hangers and floggers had failed to amend, the whole thing was devised to hit hunt saboteurs. It is heard in the Magistrates’ Court, and it carries a sentence of up to three months in prison (so out in six weeks), or of a fine up to Level 4 on the standard scale (so a maximum of £2500), or of both. That would hardly impress Donald Trump, so another outpost of the Occupation may be about to be evacuated in the dead of night, back to the land of livestreamed executions. The very, very, very best of riddance.

Viam Inveniam Aut Faciam?

One of my cellmates was from Peterlee, where he was recently murdered. His name was Dean Fishwick, and his death made it onto to Look North. But the panel on Question Time recalled Peter Kay in Phoenix Nights, or Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, or Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets. Except that those characters, though played by the same actor, could easily be told apart.

All right, I’ll give you Kevin Maguire, with whose late cousin I used to go to Mass, just as I used to go to Mass with Dean. But otherwise, Question Time went to Grahame Morris’s constituency and to Darren Grimes’s county, yet that was the only panel that could be assembled? Annabel Denham is on everything. You probably cannot travel 20 miles in Britain without some change in the accent. You certainly cannot travel 30. Yet four out of five panellists had the same accent as each other and the presenter. It was not an East Durham accent.

Meanwhile, it was all kicking off on Newsnight, with Caroline Lucas not holding back. Andrew Feinstein and the Greens took 29.3 per cent between them at Holborn and St Pancras last time. Any less than that this time, and Zack Polanski should resign.

And The Opportunity Is This

Paul Knaggs writes:

It was five months ago that the leader of Camden Council lost his seat… Not narrowly, and not quietly. On 7 May, the Greens took all three seats in Holborn and Covent Garden, a clean sweep in a ward that had returned Labour councillors without interruption since 2002, and Richard Olszewski finished outside the places in his own patch. Labour lost fifteen seats across the borough that night and clung on with a majority of three. The Greens became the largest opposition group on a council Labour has controlled for all but four years since 1971. Keir Starmer was still Prime Minister when that happened. The leadership crisis had not yet broken. The Burnham era had not begun.

Hold that date in your mind when the Holborn and St Pancras result is declared on Friday morning, because Westminster has already decided what the by-election means, and Westminster is wrong. The woman who inherited the wreckage of that council, Sagal Abdi-Wali, confirmed as Camden’s leader on 20 May, is Labour’s candidate today. She is defending the seat Starmer vacated on 1 September, when he left the Commons to pursue a role in “international affairs”. I confess, even writing that sentence feels faintly absurd. British politics has a remarkable habit of taking men who have ‘failed spectacularly’ at home and finding them a larger stage abroad from which to continue influencing the rest of us whether we want them or not, and it’s usually not.

Altogether, fifteen candidates are on the ballot. However, the press has decided it is a two-horse race between Abdi-Wali and the Green leader, Zack Polanski. And the entire political class has agreed, in advance, on what the contest is for. Remove Starmer. Insert Burnham. Call the defectors back to the polls and see whether they come home. A controlled experiment, conducted in public, with one question: was the problem Labour, or was the problem the man at the top?

What Burnham actually inherited 

The numbers explain why Labour was frightened in the first place. In July 2024, Starmer took Holborn and St Pancras with 18,884 votes, 48.9 per cent of the total. The independent Andrew Feinstein, campaigning hard on Gaza, took 7,312. The Greens took another 4,030. Labour’s majority was 11,572, and the two insurgent candidacies behind it added up to 11,342. You cannot shunt votes between candidates like counters on a board. But Feinstein has endorsed Polanski, and that makes the arithmetic politically live rather than merely academic. Then came May, and the ground moved under Labour’s feet in the places that matter. In Camden Town ward, Labour took 43.4 per cent to the Greens’ 35.8. In Kilburn the Greens took two of three seats. In Bloomsbury and Highgate they broke through. In St Pancras and Somers Town the Camden People’s Alliance, standing on an explicitly pro-Palestinian and anti-Starmer ticket in alliance with the Greens, took a seat after a recount.

Burnham’s inheritance, when he took the leadership unopposed on 17 July and the premiership on 20 July, was not simply an unpopular government. It was a coalition in pieces. Reform was taking one slice of Labour’s old working-class vote, the Greens another slice of its younger metropolitan left, independents had proved what Gaza could do to a Labour majority, and the Liberal Democrats were still perfectly capable of relieving Labour of affluent progressives. His first task was never just to be more likeable than his predecessor. It was to put Humpty Dumpty back together. Within the next twenty-four hours we find out how many pieces he has found. Except that we do not, because of what happened in Brighton.

The weekend the Greens handed it over 

Zack Polanski saw it coming. That is what makes it remarkable. On 18 September, The Guardian’s Peter Walker reported that Polanski had asked the party’s ruling executive to postpone its annual conference so the Greens could throw everything at Holborn. The executive refused. The venue was booked, members had taken leave and paid for hotels, and roughly three thousand people were expected at what would be the party’s largest gathering ever. So the Greens spent the final weekend of a parliamentary by-election campaign in Brighton, eighty miles from the doorsteps they needed to knock.

Polanski also wanted the motion on the agenda amended. He is Jewish, and he pushed for protections for Jewish members and for the removal of language calling for a single democratic Palestinian state. Conference rejected three amendments, including one that would have shielded Jewish members from being reported or disciplined over their association with synagogues or community organisations identifying as Zionist. Then, on Friday, he gave his keynote speech and left for London. On Sunday 4 October, in his absence, members voted by 1,022 to 813 to make the Green Party of England and Wales formally anti-Zionist, defining Zionism as an ethnonationalist political project and declaring that anti-Zionism should not be equated with antisemitism. 

Set aside, for one moment, what you think of the motion itself. Look instead at how it was made. Fewer than one per cent of the Green membership voted on it. The campaign to pass it was driven by Greens for Palestine, a group with no official affiliation to the party, which had spent months urging supporters to join specifically in order to vote for it. The majority of the party’s MPs opposed it. The chair of Jewish Greens, Vivien Lichtenstein, a member of twenty-nine years who has worked on Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives since the 1980s, told the BBC’s Today programme that “It is quite possible that I will leave the party.” The deputy leader of the Wales Green Party resigned on Tuesday after seven years. The European Green Party condemned the decision. The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the Greens “an extremist party.” Israel’s foreign ministry has barred Polanski from entering the country.

A leader cannot control every decision a democratic membership makes, and should not try. That is the honest defence, and the Greens are entitled to it. Member-led policymaking is not a scandal; it is the thing the Greens have always said distinguishes them from Labour’s stage-managed conferences and Reform’s wholly owned subsidiary of one man’s opinions. But there is a difference between a party making its own policy and 1,835 people in a hall in Brighton making it for a membership that was not there. A movement that spent a year demanding the democratic renewal of British politics has just handed its most consequential decision to a fraction of one per cent of itself, after an outside faction recruited for the vote, while the leader who had asked for the whole weekend to be cancelled was ninety minutes up the line canvassing. Polanski wanted to lead a national insurgency. On the day his party took the most divisive decision of his leadership, he was somewhere else. That absence has allowed everybody else to decide what it meant. He went into the final week needing to explain why Holborn should send him to Parliament. He has spent it being asked what his own party believes. 

Enter Galloway, from several thousand miles away 

As though the left required another dividing line, George Galloway announced on 14 September, on his own podcast, that he would contest the seat for the Workers Party unless the Greens made him an offer he could not refuse. They did not. He is on the ballot. He is also abroad. Galloway has remained outside Britain in what he calls self-imposed exile since being detained by counter-terrorism officers in late 2025. At the time he declared his candidacy he was living in Moscow. By 22 September he had relocated to South Africa for a political tour, saying he will return when the Home Office confirms he will not be detained on arrival. His campaign is being fought remotely while activists canvass Camden on his behalf.

His stated reason for standing against Polanski is not Gaza. It is Ukraine. Galloway says the Green leader is “a supporter of NATO” and of Volodymyr Zelensky, and the Workers Party, responding to the row, attacked the Greens for what it called their support for Zelensky’s NATO spearhead. It cost him his deputy. Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP for Derby North, resigned from the Workers Party in protest, posting that he had quit because “I profoundly disagree with the decision to stand” and calling on his party to get behind Polanski instead. He was the only senior figure to say publicly what the arithmetic has been saying all along. Galloway does not need to win Holborn to shape the result. He needs only to take enough votes from people who dislike Labour but would otherwise have voted Green. That is the cruelty of first past the post. You do not always have to beat your enemy. Sometimes you merely have to beat your enemy’s enemy.

Labour has watched this film before and knows how it ends. In Ilford North in 2024, Wes Streeting survived Leanne Mohamad by 528 votes while the Green candidate took 1,794. In Birmingham Yardley, Jess Phillips held off the Workers Party’s Jody McIntyre by 693 while the Greens took 1,958. Those Green voters would not all have gone elsewhere, and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. But Labour held both seats because the opposition to it could not combine, and that is the whole of the lesson. The Greens, the Workers Party, the independents and the assorted fragments of the anti-Labour left agree with real passion that Labour must be punished. They have never managed to agree which of them administers the punishment. Get the Tories Out once gave the left a single organising instruction. Get Labour Out gives it nothing but a grievance.

The recovery is thinner than it looks

Now the steelman, because Labour deserves one. Burnham’s revival is real. Ipsos, fielding between 10 and 15 September, put Labour on 27 per cent against Reform on 23, the Conservatives on 21 and the Greens on 13, a four-point Labour lead going into conference season. Opinium’s poll of 2 October had Labour on 30, Reform 25, the Conservatives 17 and the Greens 11. More in Common this week has Burnham’s net approval at plus 16, up five points. Professor Sir John Curtice told Left Foot Forward that Labour is a great deal more popular than it was on 7 May and the Greens considerably less so, which makes Holborn a “substantial challenge” for Polanski. That is a genuine turnaround and it would be churlish to deny it.

Now look underneath. The approval figures do not agree with each other, and the disagreement matters. More in Common has Burnham comfortably positive. Ipsos, asking about satisfaction with his performance as Prime Minister rather than general favourability, found 31 per cent satisfied and 44 per cent dissatisfied. Both can be true. People can like the man and distrust the government, which is precisely the condition Labour was in before it changed leaders. Ipsos also found that seven in ten Britons remain dissatisfied with how the country is being run, and its own analysts warned, in terms, that Labour’s lead is narrow, that Burnham’s ratings are nothing to write home about by historical standards, and that Labour should not take its advantage for granted. Opinion polls are promises whispered down a telephone. Ballot boxes count. And what the ballot box will record is not how far Labour has climbed, but how far everybody else has fallen.

Have the Greens peaked? 

Almost certainly, and not because of Andy Burnham. The Green high-water mark was February, in Gorton and Denton, where Hannah Spencer overturned a Labour majority of 13,413 to take the seat, one of the largest Labour majorities ever lost at a by-election. YouGov polling around that contest had the Greens above 20 per cent and contending for second place nationally. In March, 28 per cent of Britons said they would consider voting Green and Polanski’s net favourability stood at plus five. 

The average now has the Greens at 11 per cent, down more than five points on the spring peak and lower than a year ago. YouGov, publishing on 30 September, found Polanski’s net favourability had fallen to minus 19, that half the public view him unfavourably, that only 21 per cent think he is doing a good job, and, most damaging of all, that fewer Britons will now consider voting Green than before he became leader. More in Common, polling on the eve of the by-election, put him at minus 28, the least popular leader of any major British party, below Nigel Farage. 

The decline began before Burnham arrived. Curtice traces the sharpest fall to Polanski’s response to the Golders Green attack in April, when he shared a post criticising the police, and observes drily that there have been one or two moments in the past year when the leader’s thumbs should not have twitched quite so quickly. This is the ceiling every insurgency meets, and it is never where the insurgents expect. It is not reached when voters desert. It is reached when the movement acquires the apparatus of a party: factions, conferences, standing orders, members who would rather be right than be in government, and a leader who must either face them down or be absent when they vote.

The Greens found their ceiling at their own conference, not at a ballot box. Polanski has told The Guardian he does not need to win Holborn to remain leader, calling the race “50/50”. He has said he will stay whatever happens. He may well be right that he can. The more serious question is what he would be leading. A party of 11 per cent with five MPs and a policy platform set by 1,835 people, bleeding its Jewish members and its European sister parties, is not an insurgency. It is a pressure group with a parliamentary delegation.

Why this points towards an early election 

Here is where it gets interesting, and here is where the public interest lies. Burnham has denied, publicly and repeatedly, that he will go to the country early. In a round of regional interviews on Friday 25 September he told ITV Calendar that the next election would be in 2029 and that of the speculation “I can knock that dead”. He told BBC East Midlands a flat no when asked about May. Downing Street had already dismissed the talk. That denial cannot simply be waved away because an early election makes a better story. Neither can what The i Paper reported last week. Caroline Wheeler, citing multiple sources close to the Number 10 operation, reported that a May election has not in fact been ruled out, and that some of Burnham’s closest advisers privately concede there is still a chance he goes to the country. The reported motive is straightforward: a mandate of his own for social care reform, and room to raise taxes without being accused of breaking someone else’s manifesto. 

Parliament dissolves automatically in July 2029, with the last possible polling day in August that year. Prime Ministers do not choose election dates according to vows made in September. They choose them according to opportunity. And the opportunity is this. Labour is not more popular because it has resolved anything. It is more popular because Reform has slipped, because the Conservatives remain becalmed, and because the Greens have spent the autumn arguing with themselves in Brighton while the Workers Party argues with the Greens from Johannesburg. Every one of those conditions is temporary. None of them is in Labour’s gift. All of them could be gone by the autumn of 2027. If Labour wins Holborn comfortably today, Burnham’s strategists acquire the one thing they do not currently possess: evidence, from a real ballot box, that changing the leader changed behaviour. If Labour scrapes it, the celebration will require rather more champagne than mathematics.

And if Polanski takes the former Prime Minister’s seat after Labour changed leaders specifically to stop him, then Burnham has not healed the wound. He has put a barm cake over it. But the majority will matter more than the winner, and the turnout more than either. A comfortable Labour hold tells Burnham that Starmer really was a substantial part of the problem. A narrow one tells him the anaesthetic is working but the patient is still on the table.

What should happen next

The case for scrutiny here does not rest on partisanship. It rests on consent. A government that goes to the country because its opponents are temporarily in pieces is not seeking a mandate. It is buying one at a discount, and it will spend the following five years treating a fractured opposition as though it were an endorsement. That is how we got the last decade: governments elected on narrowing slices of a shrinking turnout, each one louder than the last about the will of the people.

So three things are owed to voters before any of this proceeds. Burnham should be held precisely to what he said on 25 September, and asked, repeatedly and on the record, to reconcile it with what his own advisers are briefing. The Greens, having discovered that a thousand people in a conference hall can set the policy of a national party, should be asked whether they regard that as democracy or merely as procedure. And the rest of the left, which has now twice in two years handed Labour seats it had no business keeping, might note that the arithmetic of first past the post is not a moral position. It is a machine, and it does not care how sincere you are.

Fifteen candidates will fight over one London constituency today while the party system that governed this country for a century carries on coming apart. The old instruction was simple: keep the Tories out. For millions it has become something emptier. Keep Labour out. Keep Reform out. Keep the Greens out. Keep the lot of them out. The electorate has not yet worked out what replaces the old system. It has simply stopped believing the old one is owed its obedience. Labour is not winning the argument. It is merely the last party left standing. And a government that mistakes its rivals’ collapse for the consent of the governed will always call the election it has not earned.