Burnham brings back the Labour smiles after monster Makerfield win, next stop Downing Street

On the floor of Wigan’s Edge Centre, Labour figures couldn’t hide their delight as the Merseyside-born candidate defied expectations to land a thumping win, writes Liam Thorp

There is usually a point on the night of a by-election count when the reality of the result starts to set in.

At The Edge Conference Centre in Wigan, as the clock struck midnight, the smiles on the faces of Labour activists started to tell the story of the historic event that was about to unfold.

Politicians are usually pessimistic and keen to manage expectations – this is especially true of Labour figures these days after a bruising couple of years in government – but this time they couldn’t hide their delight.

When the ECHO asked Knowsley MP and Burnham campaign boss Anneliese Midgley how she was feeling, she simply stated: “I’m smiling”, and she wasn’t the only one. Wide grins were etched across the faces of key Burnham allies Lisa Nandy and Louise Haigh – they knew their boy had done really good.

This has been pitched as a by-election for the soul of the country and on this showing, there are still plenty of people who want to fight back against the division and anger that has poured into our public life in recent years.

For so long the pundits had predicted that this would be a tight, two-horse race between Mr Burnham and his Reform UK rival Robert Kenyon. While the polls always had the Labour man ahead, some of them suggested it would be very close in the end.

But it wasn’t close. The soon-to-be ex Mayor of Greater Manchester landed a whopping-near vote pile of 25,000, with the Reform candidate way back on less than 16,000. It was a thumping.

There haven’t been many reasons to cheer for Labour supporters in recent times, it was only just over a month ago that the party was routed in this same location by Reform in the Wigan Council elections.

It is a fair case to make that based on those trends, no other Labour candidate could have beaten Reform in this race. To have done so with such a margin means that when it comes to Labour’s future prospects, the only name in the game is Andy Burnham.

But that doesn’t mean things will be easy if he makes his way into 10 Downing Street later this year. He may have a hugely popular brand here in Greater Manchester and in an area like Makerfield which he knows so well, but appealing to the whole country is a whole different level of challenge.

The boy from Old Roan in Aintree will have a huge task on his hands to try and make people feel like politics can work for them. And he won’t have very long to do it before the threat of Reform and Nigel Farage rears its head at the next General Election.

In his victory speech in the Edge Centre in Wigan tonight, Mr Burnham said this result could be a turning point for politics in this country. There is an awful lot riding on his ability to do that and to do it quickly.