The British PM’s Labour Party came in third place in a constituency it’s held since the 1930s
Keir Starmer meets Labour Party members in London, UK, February 27, 2026 © Getty Images; Stefan Rousseau
[RT] The
UK’s Labour Party has lost a parliamentary seat it had held for almost a
century to the Green Party in an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister
Keir Starmer. Labour is projected to lose more seats in upcoming local
elections.
The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer won Thursday’s Gorton
and Denton by-election with 40.7% of the vote, with Nigel Farage’s
Reform UK coming in second with 28.7%, and Labour finishing third with
25.4%, according to results announced on Friday morning.
The
result is a striking upset for Starmer. Labour has held Gorton and
Denton – a constituency located in the Greater Manchester area – since
1935, and won more than half of the vote there in 2024.
Labour won
a 174-seat majority in 2024’s general election, sweeping Starmer into
office in the party’s third-best election in its history. Now, the
initial wave of good will toward the prime minister has evaporated.
Starmer’s approval rating now sits at -57%, the lowest of any prime
minister in history except the Conservatives’ Liz Truss, according to
polling by YouGov. The prime minister has been hammered by the right for
his failure to stop the flow of migrant boats into the UK and for his
crackdown on online “hate speech,” while all sides of the
political spectrum have condemned his failure to tackle the UK’s cost of
living crisis, and his appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to
the US.
Mandelson, who received $75,000 in unexplained payments
from Jeffrey Epstein, was arrested this week for allegedly having leaked
state secrets to the deceased pedophile.
The second-place result
in Gorton and Denton also came as a disappointment to Reform, which has
capitalized on public anger over mass immigration to become the UK’s
most popular party, according to an aggregate of opinion polls compiled
by Politico.
Reform candidate Matt Goodwin partially blamed his relatively poor result on “Muslim sectarianism,”
alleging that Muslims – who make up more than 30% of the population in
Gorton and Denton – illegally entered polling booths together to vote
for the Greens. Democracy Volunteers, an accredited poll-watching
organization, claims that it noticed incidences of this “family voting” at 68% of polling stations across the constituency.
Labour is predicted to lose thousands of council seats when Britons go to the polls to vote in local elections on May 7.