If Andy Burnham prevails in Makerfield today, Keir Starmer wants to give him a job. “I hope he wins the by-election and he plays a big part in the Labour government,” the PM told reporters at the G7 summit in France yesterday. Needless to say, it’s a trap. A close look reveals that there are multiple tripwires strung across the road from Makerfield to Downing Street.

The immediate objective is to play for time by delaying a leadership challenge. Starmer was unlucky that his rival managed to engineer a by-election so soon after Labour’s local elections disaster. However, the prospect of another by-election — this one to replace Burnham as mayor of Greater Manchester — provides the Starmerites with a second chance.

Makerfield has been hyped as the most important by-election since the Second World War. But that’s only true as a means to an end — that is, getting Burnham back to Westminster. The contest itself is unusual to the point of wider irrelevance: a referendum on whether voters want a likely next prime minister as their local MP. As such, it tells us less than a normal by-election about the balance of forces between Labour and Reform UK.

Not so the looming mayoral contest. This would take place over an area covering 27 Westminster constituencies — including the seats of Angela Rayner, Lucy Powell, and Lisa Nandy. It will tell us whether Reform really does have the support to supplant Labour across the North.

Burnham will therefore be expected to do everything he can to win the contest for Labour. Helpful actions he might undertake include photo ops with his would-be successor, door-to-door campaigning, and not plunging the national party into a concurrent civil war. Starmer is already making this point.

Of course, Burnham must realise that a Labour loss in a high-profile election — that he himself has triggered — would undo his credentials as the leadership candidate who can beat Reform. Ideally, then, he’d become Labour leader and PM before Greater Manchester even goes to the polls. That, however, would require the incumbent to depart quickly and quietly — and, so far, Starmer is taking every opportunity to insist that he’ll fight to the bitter end.

Burnham could choose to wait until later this year to make his move. But that’s where Starmer’s generous job offer comes in. If Burnham accepts, he’d be bound by collective ministerial responsibility. But if he chooses to bide his time on the backbenches, he’d have no excuse not to clarify his woolly positions on divisive internal party issues such as whether to protect welfare or properly fund defence. Andy-sceptics on the Left and the Right of the party will be waiting to pounce, with the current Labour leader somewhere in the middle hoping to benefit.

It’s often said that Starmer is no good at politics. But that’s not the case when it comes to internal party machinations. He’s an outsider who became an MP in 2015 at the age of 52. In the space of a year, he joined Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, resigned from it, and then rejoined. Next, he beat three women to become Labour leader after escaping all blame for the 2019 general election disaster. Having called himself Corbyn’s “friend”, he subsequently drove the former leader out of the party and got away with it. To cap it all off, he secured a triple-figure majority in 2024 on just 34% of the vote.

Like it or not, the man has moves. Burnham had better be ready.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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