How Gorton & Denton changed British politics | with Luke Tryl
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the end, it was not even that close. The Green party has stormed to victory in Gorton and Denton, winning their first ever parliamentary by-election by more than 4,000 votes.
The result changes everything: the Lib Dems are no longer the party of the protest vote; Reform's tanks are parked on Labour's lawn; the left has split; and the Tories are nowhere to be seen. The era of two-party politics is well and truly over, and this morning's result could well be remembered as the moment when that became glaringly apparent. Where do we go from here?
James Heale and Tim Shipman discuss with pollster Luke Tryl.
Produced by Megan McElroy and Oscar Edmondson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman, |
| 0:08.9 | the Spectator's political editor and Luke Trill of More in Common. Today we're discussing the only |
| 0:13.1 | story Westminster's concerned about the Gorton and Denton by-election. Over night we got the results, |
| 0:18.3 | Greens, 41%, reform, 29%, and the Labour Party down on just 26%. |
| 0:23.0 | And we will be discussing who are the winners and losers out of this, who's up, who's down, what it means for Keir Stama, what it means for reform, most of all what it means for the Green Party. |
| 0:32.3 | So, Luke, Greens on 41%, reform 29%, Labour around 25%. |
| 0:37.3 | I think the first question I'm most interested in is, given all the briefings about a three-horse |
| 0:41.2 | race, how on earth did the Greens win it so comfortably by a 12-point margin? |
| 0:45.2 | Well, it is truly a seismic result, and that's often you overused in politics, the word |
| 0:52.1 | seismic, but the Greens have never got above 10.2% in a |
| 0:56.5 | by-election before. In this by-election, they got four times that amount. And the way that they did |
| 1:01.9 | it was they presented themselves as the best vehicle for stopping reform, which won them a big |
| 1:08.4 | chunk of progressive voters. but they also capitalised |
| 1:12.3 | on what I call sort of progressive disillusionment with this government and with Kea Stama in |
| 1:19.2 | particular. So when we were in the seat running focus groups with people who were going to the |
| 1:24.6 | Greens, we found a few things. One was actually pretty similar |
| 1:27.8 | to what we hear around the country, just the sense that things haven't gotten better on cost |
| 1:32.3 | of living, public services don't work, this sort of change that they were promised hasn't been |
| 1:37.4 | delivered. Secondly, with Muslim voters who make up, but not in substantial proportion of the constituency. Yes, Gaza was an |
| 1:47.3 | issue, but also it was actually quite depressing, chatting to some Muslim voters in the seat, |
| 1:52.5 | who were basically saying that they felt that since the 2024 riots, that racism had effectively |
| 1:57.0 | become legitimised, and that Kea Stma did nothing to push back on it. |
... |
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