This by-election isn’t about the seat — it’s about whether Labour’s control model still works when voters stop playing along. Right, so Andrew Gwynne has resigned as a Labour MP, which means a parliamentary by-election is now locked in, whether anyone likes it or not and that certainly applies to Keir Starmer, this being his first parliamentary test since conning his way into power 18 months ago. Coming as this likely is to coincide with May’s local elections, all the more attention will be on it, and the speculation is rife as to whether or not Andy Burnham might run, or whether another Manchester local boy in Zack Polanksi might have a run at it too, especially off the back of a dynamite party election broadcast last night. But above anything else, from this point on, Starmer’s Labour in name only party has to actively defend its authority in a place once regarded as so safe it was never in question and now not only is it in question, but by how much Labour might lose it by. But the fact is briefings are happening before candidates get named. Hypothetical scenarios are already being handled like threats. And control mechanisms within Labour are being discussed out loud, which only happens when people stop trusting the system to deliver the desired outcome This doesn’t stop at one seat. It doesn’t stay local. And it doesn’t end on polling day, because once a party has to manage its own voters as a risk in what was a very safe seat, all the pieces are in play for this to become absolute Hell for Keir Starmer. Right, so Andrew Gwynne has resigned as a sitting Labour MP for Gorton and Denton in Manchester and a parliamentary by-election has been triggered in a seat Labour has treated for years as safe. Gwynne won in 2024 with 50% of the vote, actually down on 2019 when he got 65% of the vote, so this is a safe as houses Labour seat, the kind of seat that if Labour can’t hold it, they are in existential crisis territory, second place in 2024 being Reform Uk who only got 15% by comparison. But all of their problems here have a common theme – Keir Starmer himself. Labour’s first problem is that this by-election lands at a moment when Labour has already tightened every internal bolt it can reach, centralised selection, cracked down on dissent dissent, and collapsed the difference between leadership and the party machine itself.