Starmer's Faction Just Found A New Way To Bury Burnham - Without Lifting A Finger

Burnham hasn’t been handed a comeback - he’s been handed Makerfield, and Makerfield looks less like a doorway than a trapdoor. Right, so Josh Simons, the Labour MP for Makerfield, has just announced that he is standing down. He is resigning the seat. He is triggering a by-election. And the stated reason, the reason being briefed out, the reason being written up across the political press, is that he is doing it so that Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester and the man widely seen as the most serious internal threat to Keir Starmer's leadership, can come back into Parliament and run for the Labour leadership. That is the story as sold. A loyal MP, stepping aside, opening a door for a ‘returning hero’. Burnham has already confirmed he will ask Labour's National Executive Committee for permission to stand. Starmer's allies are briefing that he will not block it this time. So this time the door is open. The path is clear it seems. But here is the problem with that story. In January of this year, the exact same Andy Burnham asked to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election. The National Executive Committee, the body that decides which candidates Labour endorses, voted eight to one to block him. The same Burnham. The same threat to Starmer. The same internal politics. And yet four months later, the door that was nailed shut is suddenly open. Well, why’s that then? Something has changed. And what has changed is not Burnham's politics, and not Starmer's lack of an appetite for any kind of rival. What has changed is the seat. Let me explain who Josh Simons is first and foremost if you aren’t familiar with him, and let’s face it, when it comes to all but the most frontline politicians, few of us are, because this matters, and the coverage so far has been remarkably quiet about it. Simons is not some random backbencher who has decided, on principle, to give up his career for the good of the party. Until February of this year, Simons ran Labour Together. Labour Together is the internal Labour faction, the think tank and organising operation, that played the central role in getting Keir Starmer elected leader after Jeremy Corbyn. It is the Starmer machine. It is the operation that built the takeover.