Andy Burnham has overcome a major hurdle to challenging embattled UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer by winning the Makerfield by-election in resounding fashion.<\/p>\n
Mr Burnham, who is widely \u200cseen as the most likely contender to succeed Mr Starmer as Labour leader, won the seat in England’s north-west with a resounding 24,297 votes.<\/p>\n
The candidate for Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party came second with 15,696 votes.<\/p>\n
The populist politician is expected to challenge the UK Prime Minister for the national leadership within a matter of days.<\/p>\n
Mr Starmer has already warned Mr Burnham against launching a leadership challenge.<\/p>\n
The UK Prime Minister commented on the by-election at this week’s G7 summit, saying it would be a “bad thing” for the country were there to be a challenge against his leadership.<\/p>\n
The British leader, who was elected to the UK’s top political job in 2024 in a landslide win over former Conservative PM Rishi Sunak, has already tried to ward off Mr Burnham’s Labour leadership hopes.<\/p>\n
“I hope he wins the by-election and he’ll play a big part in the Labour government,” Mr Starmer told reporters at the summit being held this week in Evian, France.<\/p>\n
With Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andy Burnham has overcome a major hurdle to challenging embattled UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer by winning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[135609,59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-646581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-burnham","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}