Dan Hodges

And indeed, you know, to all intents and purposes, reform were maybe favourites for the seat.

But as I said, it became...

clear sort of quite early that the Burnham factor, the inversion of the sort of vote for me reforms vote for us ditch Starmer message was very potent.

But also, and it was something I did start to pick up in the local elections as well.

There are now serious issues for the reform project and the Nigel Farage project.

Well, you know, there's obviously a lot of things to pick up there.

I mean, I think, as I say, Julia is right that it wasn't necessarily

an endorsement of Keir Starmer's Labour Party.

There was, though, a very strong sense amongst the people I was speaking to that Andy Burnham represented a sort of return to a Labour Party that they personally can feel much more comfortable with.

And you can argue whether or not Labour won or Andy Burnham won.

I mean, I don't think you can.

It's quite clearly a very significant personal triumph for him.

But the one thing that we can also be clear on is in a seat that, you know, Julie is talking about, you know, popular Westminster opinion, conventional Westminster opinion over the last month has been this was a by-election that was on a knife edge.

If Andy Burnham was going to win, he was probably going to be because he was gifted the seat by Rupert Lowe and Restore.

And the reality is reform got a pretty big shellacking here.

You know, they didn't even come, they didn't even come close.

I mean, I saw, I mean, I tweeted before, I saw Matthew Goodwin earlier saying, you know, this shows, you know, again, shows reform can, you know, run the establishment parties right to the line.

I mean, as I said, I mean, you know, reform weren't even in the picture when Andy Burnham got across the line.

And I think the issue is, you know, again, I talked about this before,

You know, I do think reform, you know, we are starting to see a pattern developing.