Luke Tryl

Go for a butter pie or a potato meat pie.

He was the MP who said, oh, here's the thing.

He's a local lad, he's a local plumber, he knows the area, he's from the area and he's not overly ambitious like Andy.

He doesn't have a clue what he's doing

And in a way, I feel a tiny bit sorry for him because he's been put up there and he clearly can't handle it.

But yet he's being left to flounder there.

People are so reasonable.

The most important by-election contest in the past 50 years.

Makerfield?

Blimey.

We are.

And if the data is confirming anything, I think it's what we expected going into it, that this is going to be a very hotly contested race, particularly between Labour and Reform UK.

I mean, it was interesting in...

the focus group, you saw those tensions on play really starkly.

On the one hand, you know, you had people in the group who had real appreciation for things that Burnham had done locally.

On the other hand, there was, and perhaps more than I'd expected, actually, in that group, a sort of

resentment, the idea of make a field being used as a stepping stone to advance Burnham's political career.

And then a really interesting tension, which Lara and I talked about afterwards, actually, which was, you know, whilst the group were mixed on what they thought about Burnham, mixed on what they thought about Farage, they were very down across the piece on the prime minister.

I don't think we had a Keir Starmer fan in the focus group.

And yet it rubbed so much up against voter psychology, the idea that the best way to get rid of Keir Starmer was to vote Labour to get Andy Burnham into Parliament.