Personal decision for Starmer on whether to fight leadership contest, minister says

Nandy admitted it would be a "tough fight" for Burnham to win in Makerfield, with Reform UK performing strongly in last week's council elections in the area.

Labour won the constituency with a majority of 5,399 votes in the 2024 general election, but Nigel Farage's party has been consistently leading in national opinion polls since spring last year.

There are no precise figures for how the parties performed in Makerfield during the local elections because the ward boundaries do not fully align with the constituency boundaries - but Reform UK won roughly 50% of the vote share in the area.

However, Burnham's backers argue this does not account for the strong personal support he has in Greater Manchester, where he has won three successive landslides in mayoral elections.

Nandy said: "Because of Andy's record as mayor, people who didn't vote for [Labour] last week were saying that they would vote for us again."

She added: "That's why I make no apology for saying that I think he is a really important voice that needs to be heard loud and clear at the centre of Westminster."

Simons told the programme it would be "existential" for the Labour Party if it lost the Makerfield by-election.

He said the contest was "about a fundamental question for my party, which is can they win back the trust of working-class people".

"If the answer to that question is yes, then I think we can get to a moment of unifying and coming together from the different traditions across my party," he added.

However, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said: "It doesn't matter whether it's Andy Burnham or Keir Starmer, the problem is the Labour Party."

Earlier in the week, Sir Keir defied calls to step down, after nearly 90 of his own MPs urged him to go and five ministers resigned.

Among them was now-former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who has confirmed he would stand in any future leadership race.

In a speech on Saturday, Streeting said leaving the European Union had been a "catastrophic mistake" and the UK should "one day" rejoin the bloc.

Burnham has also said there may be a case for rejoining the EU "in the long-term", but insisted he was "not advocating that in this by-election".

Asked about Streeting's comments, Nandy said that while she campaigned for Remain in the 2016 referendum, "if the answer to all of this was the European Union, then essentially we'd be saying to people what was going on in 2015 in towns like Wigan was absolutely fine".

"Well, I can tell you that it wasn't, that people's living standards had been falling, people's high streets had been falling apart, people's kids had had to get out to get on for some time, and that's to do with deindustrialisation and the failure of governments to address it," she said.

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