News of the Greens’ victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election came at 4:30 a.m., but the losers’ excuses were already prepared. The Labour Party had suffered a typical defeat for incumbents but still run a “positive campaign,” reasoned its deputy leader, Lucy Powell. Supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK insisted they had won the “working-class” vote, but had been outdone by “sectarian” “Islamists” and by Muslim men pressuring their wives’ choice.

Some of this was a bit of a stretch. Labour’s supposedly “positive” campaign had prominently accused the Greens of encouraging schoolkids to take heroin. The party also photoshopped a fake tactical-voting organization, alongside poll charts telling voters it was in a “two-horse race” with Reform UK (thus cropping out the Greens, who ultimately won handily, with 40 percent support).

Likewise hard to fathom was the supposed Muslim “sectarian” vote for a white, female candidate for a Green party with a gay, Jewish leader. Pundits on Sky and GB News nonetheless talked up such claims, while also insinuating that Muslims in Manchester simply aren’t working-class, or that Muslim women might have voted for a right-wing, anti-immigrant party if not for undue pressure from their husbands.