Gorton and Denton campaign hits final day with new poll suggesting Greens, Labour and Reform UK all possible winners
Good morning. It is the last full day of campaigning in the Gorton and Denton byelection and a new poll is out which suggests – that it is too close to call, and that the Green party, Labour and Reform UK all have a credible chance of winning.
The data is a bit more specific than that. Opinium has done the poll for Byline Times and Forward Democracy and the figures show a dead heat amongst all voters (the Greens and Labour on 28%, Reform UK on 27%), but the Greens (30%) marginally ahead of Labour and Reform UK (both on 28%) amongst people likely to vote.
This is the second poll suggesting the Greens are marginally ahead. An Omnisis poll at the end of last week had the Greens on 33%, Reform UK on 29% and Labour on 26%. But constituency polling can be very erratic, and most of these leads are within the margin of error, and so the only reliable takeaway with regard to the result is – it’s too close to call.
But there is another takeaway that is reliable. In what traditionally has been a safe Labour seat, there are two insurgent, challenger parties that are competitive. We are used to byelections where one outsider party is doing well, but here Reform UK and the Greens are both potential winners. This is further confirmation that the two-party system has completely broken down, and we are now in an era of multi-party politics.
There is also another, apparently solid finding in the Opinium polling. Adam Bienkov reports in his write-up for Byline Times:
The poll suggests that tactical voting could easily swing the contest, with anti-Reform voters significantly more likely to switch to the Greens than to Labour.
Around two thirds (66%) of those Labour and Liberal Democrat voters surveyed said they would be prepared to switch to the Greens if they were the party most likely to beat Reform, compared to just 41% of Green and Lib Dem voters who said they would switch to Labour to defeat Farage’s party.
Commenting on the poll, James Crouch, head of policy and public affairs at Opinium, said:
The Gorton & Denton by-election is shaping up to be an incredibly tight and unpredictable three-way race, with this latest poll also suggesting the Greens could benefit more than Labour from tactical voting in the final days of the campaign.
We will hear more about this at PMQs.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.
Afternoon: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is on a visit where she is talking about the Ofgem price cap announcement.
And the government is publishing its courts and tribunals bill today.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Ben Walker is a New Statesman data journalist who runs an election forecasting model Britain Predicts and he has had a go at forecasting the result in Gorton and Denton. The model is not a poll; it uses polling data, but then adjusts the figures on a constituency by constituency basis taking into account a range of factors. It has performed well in the past but, in his write-up of his final forecast, Walker says the result here is “anyone’s guess” because the Greens, Reform UK and Labour are so close.
Walker thinks there could be just a few hundred votes between the party coming first an the party coming last.
Under the bonnet there are also turnout assumptions. The model expects 37,300 votes to be cast, up from 36,600 in 2024. In practice that puts the Greens on course for 11,500 votes, Reform 11,300, and Labour 10,900. A few hundred votes separate first from third.
There have actually been three polls published from Gorton and Denton but the first one, a Find Out Now one, has been mostly ignored because it only had a sample size of 143 (too small to take seriously) and the company says it was not involved in the decision to release the figures to the media. But, for the record, here is a chart with all three sets of polling results.
In the light of today’s Gorton and Denton polling (see 9.11am), it is worth remembering what Philip Cowley, another politics professor, describes as his law of byelection analysis.
I feel Thursday could be a test of Cowley’s Law of By-Election Analysis: that too much attention is paid to who wins.
Also, Cowley’s rarely used Supplementary Law of By-Election Analysis: too much attention can be paid to who comes third.
Next EU-UK summit likely to happen in July, later than expected, EU commissioner says
Lisa O’Carroll
Lisa O’Carroll is a Guardian correspondent covering trade.
The next EU-UK summit will probably not happen until July, Maroš Šefčovič has said.
It means the summit will take place two months after it was expected and could indicate that negotiations over a new farm food agreement involving sanitary and phytosanitary checks, along with negotiations of the carbon border mechanism, are taking longer than expected.
Speaking to the European parliament, Šefčovič, the EU commissioner for trade, also confirmed that the UK and EU are intensifying engagement with calls expected between the commissioner and Europe minister Nick Thomas-Symonds every fortnight.
Sources said this was to allow political resolution to avert any looming roadblocks that emerge at official level.
One source said it was to ensure there was no repeat of last November’s “embarrassing” collapse of talks between the UK and the EU over joining the EU’s Safe defence programme.
European parliament president Roberta Metsola is in London today while business secretary Peter Kyle is in Brussels
Byelection coverage in the UK would probably be much improved if MPs were only allowed to resign, or die, in constituencies with a politics professor active on social media living nearby. Fortunately, in Gorton and Denton, there is one on hand. Prof Rob Ford, one of the nation’s leading psephologists, lives in the constituency next door, he once wrote a book with the Reform UK candidate (they have since fallen out), and he has been writing at length about the contest on his Substack account.
His latest post was published last night, and it includes analysis of the latest poll. (See 9.11am.) It is well worth reading in full, but here is an extract from his conclusion.
Whoever wins on Friday, the result is likely to confirm a number of trends. Labour are sinking, populist parties are rising on the right and on the left, and as those parties are becoming viable and competitive in ever more seats, elections are becoming even more unpredictable. Prospects have never looked bleaker for the mainstream parties who have dominated British politics for so long – both may soon fall out of the top two in national polling, both face annihilation in the May local and devolved elections, and as the tide of revolt rises everywhere there are no safe seats left for either party’s MPs or local councillors ….
Whichever party emerges victorious on Friday, we may come to see this as the day Labour’s electoral Tinkerbell dies. And if voters’ beliefs about who can and cannot win are changed by this weeks events, then the pace of change may be about to accelerate once again. Hold on to your hats.
Energy bills will fall by £117 for millions of households in Great Britain from April
Annual energy bills will fall by £117 for millions of households from April after Rachel Reeves’s plan to cut £150 a year from bills was partly foiled by rising costs, Jillian Ambrose reports.
Gorton and Denton campaign hits final day with new poll suggesting Greens, Labour and Reform UK all possible winners
Good morning. It is the last full day of campaigning in the Gorton and Denton byelection and a new poll is out which suggests – that it is too close to call, and that the Green party, Labour and Reform UK all have a credible chance of winning.
The data is a bit more specific than that. Opinium has done the poll for Byline Times and Forward Democracy and the figures show a dead heat amongst all voters (the Greens and Labour on 28%, Reform UK on 27%), but the Greens (30%) marginally ahead of Labour and Reform UK (both on 28%) amongst people likely to vote.
This is the second poll suggesting the Greens are marginally ahead. An Omnisis poll at the end of last week had the Greens on 33%, Reform UK on 29% and Labour on 26%. But constituency polling can be very erratic, and most of these leads are within the margin of error, and so the only reliable takeaway with regard to the result is – it’s too close to call.
But there is another takeaway that is reliable. In what traditionally has been a safe Labour seat, there are two insurgent, challenger parties that are competitive. We are used to byelections where one outsider party is doing well, but here Reform UK and the Greens are both potential winners. This is further confirmation that the two-party system has completely broken down, and we are now in an era of multi-party politics.
There is also another, apparently solid finding in the Opinium polling. Adam Bienkov reports in his write-up for Byline Times:
The poll suggests that tactical voting could easily swing the contest, with anti-Reform voters significantly more likely to switch to the Greens than to Labour.
Around two thirds (66%) of those Labour and Liberal Democrat voters surveyed said they would be prepared to switch to the Greens if they were the party most likely to beat Reform, compared to just 41% of Green and Lib Dem voters who said they would switch to Labour to defeat Farage’s party.
Commenting on the poll, James Crouch, head of policy and public affairs at Opinium, said:
The Gorton & Denton by-election is shaping up to be an incredibly tight and unpredictable three-way race, with this latest poll also suggesting the Greens could benefit more than Labour from tactical voting in the final days of the campaign.
We will hear more about this at PMQs.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.
Afternoon: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is on a visit where she is talking about the Ofgem price cap announcement.
And the government is publishing its courts and tribunals bill today.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (between 10am and 3pm), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.