I am no expert in US politics, but seeing flags on front lawns through the windows of a coach from Chicago to Urbana-Champaign in fall 2022 prompted my first inkling that Donald Trump winning a second term was a distinct possibility. Closer to home in England, a night out this spring in the impoverished but picturesque former mining town of Barnsley — twenty-five miles from where I work and live in Leeds — was my first direct encounter with a phenomenon I had till then only read about in the press. For I saw rows and rows of houses and businesses adorned with “patriotic” St George and Union flags as part of the Raise the Colours campaign. A couple of months down the line and Labour lost control of Barnsley city council for the first time in fifty years, with Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK taking charge. If the former Labour stronghold, which suffered more under austerity than virtually anywhere else in Britain, provided a damning indictment of Keir Starmer’s failure to connect with large swaths of the population, it also showcased how and why the future of the Labour Party and national politics would be fought far from Westminster.

If God loves a trier, the time is nigh for the self-appointed “King of the North.” Andy Burnham twice ran unsuccessfully for the Labour leadership (losing to Ed Miliband in 2010 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2015) when the party was in opposition, before being elected mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017. As a mayor rather than an MP, Burnham was ineligible to make a leadership challenge against Starmer following Labour’s battering in this May’s local elections. This changed when Labour MP Josh Simons agreed to step aside and trigger a by-election in Makerfield this June 18, thus allowing Burnham to run as the Labour candidate and win the election. Once back in Parliament, Burnham was rapidly anointed as Labour’s next leader, and Starmer has now stepped aside to let him become Britain’s new prime minister.

Burnham running in this specific constituency was a calculated risk. On the one hand, he had popular grassroots appeal in Makerfield, located roughly halfway between Manchester and Liverpool, not far from where he was born. It is also exactly the kind of postindustrial working-class area in which Reform has overtaken Labour (it had won in May’s local elections there). By running, Burnham was not only putting himself in a position to become leader but also pitching his candidacy by showing that he — and perhaps only he — could reclaim for Labour a northern demographic that the party had for too long taken for granted.