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Labour’s decision to bar Andy Burnham from standing in a Westminster byelection was about “focus than about factionalism”, so the party would not be distracted ahead of vital elections in May, Douglas Alexander, the Scotland secretary, has said.
Defending the decision by the party’s national executive committee (NEC) to block the Greater Manchester mayor from being a candidate for the Gorton and Denton byelection, Alexander said this was not because Keir Starmer was scared of a leadership challenge.
The vote on Sunday by a sub-group of the NEC, including Starmer, has sparked an internal battle inside Labour, with a series of MPs and affiliated unions expressing anger at the decision.
Burnham said he was “disappointed”, promising to support whoever was selected to fight the seat vacated last week by Andrew Gwynne. But in a later tweet on Sunday, he seemed to predict that Labour would now lose the byelection.
Asked about the decision, Alexander told Sky News that the NEC “had to reach a judgment as to where the best interests of the Labour party lay”, adding: “My own judgment is that this was more about focus than about factionalism.”
If Burnham had been selected for the seat, he would have been obliged to give up his Greater Manchester mayoralty halfway through a four-year term, triggering a byelection there.
A Labour statement on Sunday said this “would have a substantial and disproportionate impact on party campaign resources ahead of the local elections and elections to the Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd in May”.
Alexander echoed this argument, saying Burnham standing down would have created “an unnecessary byelection, but also probably months of psychodrama”.
He went on: “The rulebook of the Labour party has an assumption against a sitting mayor or sitting police and crime commissioner standing [for parliament]. That’s why you have to ask special permission if you’re a serving mayor.
“If we had granted that decision yesterday … we would also face the contest in more than 20 parliamentary constituencies in the Manchester mayoralty.
“So I think the judgment was that, if you like, there would be a lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of resources committed to what would be judged to be an unnecessary contest.”
Asked if he also accepted that Burnham had been open about his ambition to lead Labour, and whether this was also a factor, Alexander replied: “Andy has signalled very clearly his ambition to lead the Labour party in the future.
“I think that’s perfectly honourable ambition. The national executive committee reached a judgment that the time is not right for Andy to come back to Westminster, not least because he’s only served two of his four years in the second term as Manchester mayor.”
The decision caused fury among many Labour MPs, not all of them natural allies of Burnham, with one condemning what they called “petty factionalism”.
Andrea Egan, head of the huge Unison union, a significant Labour funder, said members would be “disappointed and angry”. A series of unions are understood to be in discussions about what they may do jointly to try to change the decision. “This is blatant gerrymandering,” one union source said. “It will not do.”
Before the decision, senior Labour figures including Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, and Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, called for Burnham to be allowed to stand.
In another post on X on Sunday, Burnham complained that he had first learned of the news from the media, saying it “tells you everything you need to know about the way the Labour Party is being run these days”.
On Sunday, Labour briefed that this was only because Burnham could not be contacted. But Alexander said he accepted this might not have been the case.
“It wouldn’t be the first time that what was supposed to be a confidential meeting about internal matters for the Labour party with a large number of people in the room leaked out. So if that happened, that’s wrong,” he said.
