If a week is a long time in politics then a day can also be long. Not more than a few hours after I published an article about Andy Burnham former Health Secretary and current Labour mayor for Greater Manchester and his attempt to fight the Gorton and Denton constituency, along comes news that the Labour National Executive Committee have blocked Burnham from standing by a quite significant majority, of 8:1.
Burnham's ambitions are, for the moment, a bit busted. He threw his hat in the ring and got blocked by the NEC which is unlikely to want to allow to stand someone who is going to be a thorn in the side of Starmer even if he doesn't directly challenge him for the leadership. Mr Burnham must be a bit embarrassed by this but he must have expected something like this to happen. I suppose that Mr Burnham will go back to his mayoral job but he might have another go at Westminster at some other future by-election?
The prospect of Mr Burnham not standing in the Gorton and Denton contest might make this election less interesting to some but I disagree on that. This is still in my view going to be an interesting contest as Labour are not the dead cert they once might have been in a seat like this and there are certain minorities in this area who might be persuaded to vote for a sectarian candidate and although the sectarian candidate might not win they could pick up a respectable number of votes. I totally dismiss the Tories and the Lib Dems in this seat as they got 7.9% and 3.8% respectively. There's also going to be a lot of interest in this seat from the crank left like the Workers Party, the Greens and possibly whatever 'Your Party' is called this week. Reform came second last time this seat was fought and got 14.1% but they will have to do an awful lot better than that in order to take the seat but if the left wing vote is split between the crank left parties and Labour, who got 50% last time, it might be achievable.
