After Gorton and Denton: Campaigning in a five-party age
Gill Morris
Executive Chair and Co-Founder, Devo Agency
16/03/2026
Did 2 party politics die on the doorsteps of Gorton and Denton?
Did the Gorton and Denton by-election mark the end of two-party politics? It certainly looks like a fatality. Where do we go from here? If we now have five or six serious parties competing for support — communications, campaigns, tactics and even the electoral system has to change. We need to stop behaving like there is a straight binary choice in every seat.
Gill Morris talks about the failure to win cut through and how this mismatch is hollowing out the very core of political debate.
The result in Gorton and Denton matters. But how the campaign was fought may matter more.
Much of the communications, campaign messaging, online ads and doorstep scripts weren’t about competing visions for the area. They were about electoral arithmetic: bar charts, tactical voting and arguments about who was “really second”.
Each party tried to manufacture its own two-horse race.
Labour and the Greens framed it as themselves versus Reform. Reform tried to present it as Reform versus the Greens.
Everyone produced their own version of reality.
The result was a campaign that often felt oddly empty. Voters were asked to choose between charts rather than ideas. Between tactics rather than policies. Between who could stop whom, rather than what anyone would actually do.
In a fragmented political era, that proved to be a dangerous path.
If five- or six-party politics is the new normal, we cannot keep pretending every contest is binary. In Gorton and Denton this only deepened cynicism and reinforced the sense that politics is a game of manoeuvre rather than a vehicle for change.
Which is odd, because Labour in government actually does have things to talk about. But it’s not landing. People are not feeling it at the petrol pump or in their back pockets.
Programmes like Pride in Place are beginning to show what locally shaped investment can achieve. In Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham has built a model that connects transport, housing, health and work into something recognisably Mancunian. These are tangible examples of what place-based power can deliver.
Locally, Angeliki Stogia’s message of “unity not division” was the right instinct. There were also glimpses of something bigger: direct mail from Andy Burnham, the yellow honeycomb branding, and the sense that this campaign sat within a wider civic story about Manchester.
Manchester has its own political flavour — call it Manchesterism, or Mancunian socialism. A mix of pride in place, aspiration and practical reform. It has been so successful that opponents increasingly borrow its language.
When Green candidate Hannah Spencer lifted Burnham’s line — “this is Manchester, we do things differently here” — it told its own story.
But for Labour this wasn’t enough.
Despite visible local achievements — not least the yellow Bee Network buses running through the constituency — too much of the messaging relied on warning voters what might happen if they didn’t vote Labour, rather than the opportunities for them and Labour’s mission.
The failure to cut through left Labour exposed to populist pressure from both left and right. And the fixation on tactical positioning crowded out what should have been the core argument: how devolution, local investment and economic reform actually improve people’s lives in Gorton and Denton.
There is also a harder structural lesson.
In a fragmented political system, first-past-the-post becomes increasingly distorting. It is now entirely plausible for someone to win executive power on 20% of the vote. That is not a recipe for legitimacy. It rewards mobilisation of narrow bases rather than broad consent.
The Conservatives changed mayoral elections to first-past-the-post because they believed it would help them. In today’s politics, I fear it helps no one and brings on division.
If the government is serious about devolution and strong local mandates, it should restore the Supplementary Vote for mayors. Place-based leadership works best when it is built on broad consent, not thin pluralities.
Multi-party politics is not a temporary glitch. It reflects deeper shifts in trust, identity and representation.
The real question is whether our campaigning culture will catch up.
If everything becomes about stopping someone else, nothing is really about improving places and lives. If every leaflet is a bar chart, no one is explaining what power is actually for.
That is how campaigns lose their soul — and how voters lose their patience.
Devolution is meant to reconnect politics to everyday life: wages, housing, transport, public space, pride in place. It requires parties to argue for something, not just against someone.
The lesson of Gorton and Denton is not just about the result. It is a warning.
Five-party politics squeezed into a two-party campaign model will only result in a mixed bag of results and feed greater inertia in our democratic process. Electoral reform is one way to go but making sure voters are engaged and know what and who they are voting for and why is another. Fighting elections in a populist world demand campaigns which win cut through not switch off. Both Labour and Conservatives are simply not cutting it.
We can double down on tactical theatre- OR we can give people some real stories and new ideas to vote for and make certain their votes count and deliver the promise of change they crave.
One thing’s for sure, it has to change and change fast!