British Prime Minister Suffers Major By-Election Defeat as Epstein Scandal Casts Pall

By Chris Summers

The ruling Labour Party in the UK was beaten into third place on Feb. 26 in a by-election in a former stronghold in Manchester in the north of England, piling more pressure on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Starmer—who has faced calls to resign recently after revelations in the Epstein files about the former British ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson—told the BBC that Thursday’s defeat in the Gorton and Denton by-election was a “very disappointing result.”

Mandelson—who Starmer appointed—was arrested and then released by the Metropolitan Police in London earlier this week, after the U.S. federal government released emails between the ambassador and the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

On Thursday, the Green Party candidate, Hannah Spencer, was elected with 14,980 votes, ahead of Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin, who received 10,578.

Labour’s candidate, Angeliki Stogia, came third with 9,364 votes in a seat where the previous Labour MP, Andrew Gwynne, had a majority of more than 13,000 at the general election in 2024.

Gwynne resigned last month for health reasons, but Labour’s National Executive Committee refused to allow the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham—who is seen as a potential challenger for the leadership of the party—to stand for the seat.

Burnham could only challenge for the leadership and become prime minister if he were a member of Parliament.

Voters ‘Impatient for Change’

“Incumbent governments quite often get results like that mid-term, but I do understand that voters are frustrated. They’re impatient for change.” Starmer told reporters on Feb. 27.

“I will keep on fighting for those people for as long as I’ve got breath in my body.”

Starmer described the Greens and Reform UK as “the extremes in politics.”

He said Reform, on the right, supported the “politics of hatred and division,” while the left-wing Greens supported leaving NATO and legalizing all drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine.

When asked by reporters whether it was a mistake not to pick Burnham, Starmer said the party had an “excellent candidate,” who lost.

Spencer said she thought she would have had a harder fight if Burnham had been the Labour candidate, but she still thought they would have won.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski said the result in Gorton and Denton showed that “Labour’s electoral stranglehold is over.”

The Greens now have five seats in the 650-seat House of Commons.

Reports of ‘Family Voting’

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said his party had reported several cases of “family voting,” where people were allegedly coerced into voting for a certain party by relatives.

“What was witnessed yesterday is deeply concerning and raises serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas,” Farage said.

“If this is what was happening at polling stations, just imagine the potential for coercion with postal votes.”

The Henry Jackson Society found that 29 percent of voters in Gorton and Denton identified as Muslims in the 2021 census.

Andrea Egan, the general secretary of Britain’s largest trade union, Unison, which is a major donor to the Labour Party, wrote on X: “The Greens won because Labour under Starmer has abandoned progressive values, imitating the far-right instead of taking the fight to them.

“If the government wants to survive, it urgently needs to stand up for workers and defend the fundamental values of our movement.”

Another union leader, Sharon Graham, described the result as a “wake-up call”.

“Workers and families are hurting. We have a cost-of-living crisis largely being ignored and investment in jobs for the here-and-now being blocked by a Treasury that doesn’t seem to understand the basics of what is needed to build Britain,” she wrote on X.

Reuters contributed to this report.