Farage claims Reform won in Makerfield – if you think about it

Some insane mental gymnastics here...

In the early hours of Friday morning, Labour’s Burnham stormed to victory in the Makerfield by-election, winning 55% of the vote.

The win sees him return to Parliament and paves the way for him to challenge Keir Starmer as Labour leader.

When the vote was announced last month, it had been expected that Reform would present a stern challenger to Burnham in the election, given the pro-Brexit sentiment in Makerfield and the success Reform saw in the area at May’s local elections.

But in the end, the result wasn’t even close, with Burnham beating Reform’s Robert Kenyon by more than 9,000 votes (24,937 to 15,696).

Combined with other by-election defeats in Scotland, this has probably been Reform’s worst night since the 2024 general election.

So, it wasn’t long before party leader Nigel Farage started getting the excuses.

In a video message shared on Friday morning following the results, Farage even seemed to suggest that, in a roundabout way, Reform had won in Makerfield.

The Clacton MP opened the video by saying the Makerfield by-election was an “emphatic win” for Burnham “with a vote share nobody could quite see coming”.

He then added that Burnham is a “popular local mayor” comparing him to Boris Johnson as a way to explain his win over Reform by more than 9,000 votes.

Farage went on to argue that “what really happened here” was that voters had voted in order to “get Starmer out,” drawing parallels between his party’s campaign at the local elections and Burnham’s not-so-subtle campaign message in Makerfield.

The Reform leader claimed his party was “slightly hoist with our own petard”.

Farage then took aim at Restore, asking them: “What do you want?”

He claimed Reform are the “challenger party to the left in this country.”

The Reform leader damned the Tories with faint praise for their by-election win in Aberdeen South, saying “good for them.”

He then predicted that the Conservatives would only find success in small pockets of strength around the country, before claiming that Reform are “still the big national party on the centre right.”

Perhaps the maddest thing he said in that video is that Reform are a centre-right party…