The loss of Gorton and Denton is worse than that sounds. Labour not only lost it to Reform, they lost it to both popular departments, the other being Reform UK.

To suppose that this has no meaning and is but a mid-term aberration by a bit of Manchester is crazy. There is no superstar in Hannah Spencer, she is an ordinary lady who worked as a plumber.

It is time that the Labour party woke up and behaved as a party that helps the working people that both Reform and the Greens have claimed (rightly) to have the support of.

We will see how this plays out over the weeks to come, but for now , the night is most specially green (and pink)

Turnout for the by-election was 47.6 per cent, down very slightly from 47.8 per cent at the 2024 general election. Scores on the door in percentage figures, because I think that better captures the important dynamics in by-elections.

This is a much bigger victory for the Greens than forecast by the pollsters, and the reasons are obvious.

When I visited the seat I was struck just how many people liked the Greens and/or Spencer. But more importantly they knew what they didn’t want to happen, which was to wake up with a Reform MP, particularly one such as Matthew Goodwin, whose public pronouncements are so far from moderate opinion and whose statements about Britishness were seen by many people I spoke to as a direct attack on them personally.

Two polls published just before the by-election showed the Greens narrowly ahead. This was decisive in making the Greens the option of choice for anti-Reform voters.

Of the four by-elections that Reform has contested this parliament (two to the Westminster parliament, one to the Senedd in Wales, one in Holyrood) Nigel Farage’s party has won just one of them — in Runcorn, very narrowly. In that race, the previous Labour incumbent had literally been convicted for assaulting one of his own constituents.

Reform keeps adding more and more divisive positions to its platform and as a result, most British voters are going to try to stop it forming a government.

Labour is governing badly and over the past 18 months it has equivocated on the issues on which people most oppose Reform. So, where there is a viable way to stop Reform that doesn’t run through voting Labour, people will often take it. True of Plaid Cymru in Caerphilly and the Greens in Gorton. I’m not saying these parties don’t have an appeal of their own to some voters: they really do.

But this by-election is a demonstration of the fact that there is a fear of Reform across the country that makes it hard for it to win an election, and a contempt for Labour that means there is no guarantee it will be the sole beneficiary of the desire to stop Farage. Indeed for Labour, unless it makes big and far-reaching changes, it is at risk not just of being defeated at the next election but of being replaced as Britain’s main party of the left.