Gorton and Denton delivers a brutal verdict on Starmer and a broken electoral system, writes Nick Ferrari

It goes without saying that the biggest loser is Sir Keir Starmer. His judgement on everything from staff appointments to the Chagos Islands appears calamitous.

To spend so much political capital on blocking Andy Burnham only to see it blow up in such a spectacular fashion is beyond embarrassing and heaps yet more pressure on him.

This comes as he struggles to remove himself from the mess of his own making following a series of dizzying U-turns that have seen support for both his party and himself haemorrhaging.

To put last night into context, Gorton and Denton had been the sixth safest Labour seat. Less than two years ago the party scored almost half of the vote in a seat they had held for just under a century.

I guess to be fair there was one thing that Sir Keir was right about.

There was only one party that could stop Reform.

But the problem for him is that it wasn’t Labour!

With the local elections looming in May, Labour’s doom loop is set to continue and how Sir Keir is now meant to staunch the flow of his supporters turning right to embrace Reform UK or left to join the Green Party seems a thankless and impossible task.

For the other ‘heritage party’ the picture is gloomy, albeit nothing like as bleak as it is for the government.

No one ever expected the Conservatives to win the seat, but to score a vote share of under two per cent and lose their deposit is getting close to being as bad as it can get.

Reform UK tried to put a brave face on it and their defence that it was not a target seat is valid.

However when the by-election was announced there was a genuine sense the party might pull off another eye-catching coup and as they’ve consistently led in the polls for the last 12-months they would have wanted a better performance.

Finishing 5,000 votes behind the winner is not the message they want to put out so close to the local elections.

The result also confirms that the Lib Dems are growing daily in irrelevance.

My message to Sir Ed Davey. Maybe it's time to abandon the surfboards and water chutes and have an actual policy idea that resonates.

But the other big loser must be our first past the post electoral system which is no longer fit for purpose in what is no loner a two-horse race.

It is now a crowded field and if you tally up the percentage of the votes for Reform and the Greens it is a whisker under 70 per cent, which makes it unsustainable for that to be ignored by an electoral system that means in too many seats a donkey wearing a rosette in the right colour would win.

If young people – a striking core of Green support – see their votes being written off in constituencies up and down the land, they’ll disengage and democracy will suffer.

As each party reacts to last week’s by-election, there is one clear message that should resonate with all of them.

First past the post has passed its sell-by date.

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