When the declaration came shortly after 4:30am at Manchester Central early Friday morning (25 Feb 2026), the scale of the result was immediately clear. In fact it took one look at the tired eyes of Reform’s Matt Goodwin or Labour’s slightly-rattled Lucy Powell to figure out that something important had happened. A hard-fought month-long campaign had culminated here, but before jubilation came a great sigh of relief for the Greens and reflection on what had led them to this achievement in Gorton and Denton.
Hannah Spencer of the Green Party had won 14,980 votes, an astonishing 40.7% of the vote, defeating second-place Reform by over 4,000 votes. A striking victory, not only for the margin, but for the exemplary choice of candidate, the ground operation and of course, the broad coalition of the electorate they had put together to deliver the votes required at the end of all this.
On Thursday morning, polling day, no one quite seemed to know where this was going, but slowly, as over 36,000 Mancunians battled the wind and rain to cast their votes, Green campaigners I spoke to on the ground in Gorton and Denton grew more confident. No matter the result, many believed they were already successful in making the Greens feel like a real, “viable option.”
[We’re] not a spoiler vote or a wasted vote but a genuine party of change, this seat also does a lot to show which party do the working class resonate more with when it comes down to it.
Assembling an unlikely coalition
Building that coalition was the campaign’s defining achievement. One half was working-class voters whom Labour had carried here for nearly a century – people who, in the Denton end of the constituency, might otherwise have drifted to Reform. The other was the Muslim communities of Gorton, a demographic that makes up 40% of the area’s population, where Labour’s grip had already been cracking since 2024. They moved decisively to the Greens, assisted by an early endorsement from The Muslim Vote, the campaign group that had helped unseat several Labour MPs over Gaza two years earlier, and by the Workers’ Party of Britain’s decision not to stand, a significant concession given they had taken 10% of the vote here in the general election.
Writing for the BBC after the result, Sir John Curtice, a politics professor at the University of Strathclyde, noted that Labour had “lost ground heavily in 2024 in seats with substantial Muslim-identifying populations, largely as a result of Labour’s initial stance at least on Israel’s actions in Gaza,” and that the Greens had been “among the apparent beneficiaries.” A member of the Young Greens in Manchester did admit to me that “the future of the Green Party is heavily dependent on the future and leadership of the Labour Party.”
But Spencer herself understood the new coalition she was assembling here, and believed it was more sustainable than that. In her victory speech, she told Muslim voters that they had more in common with white working-class communities than they believed, and that both groups “know how it feels to be looked down on.” It was a neat encapsulation of the Greens’ entire strategy in the seat.
The candidate and the importance of the ground game
However, this campaign wasn’t won on sectarian lines, it was won on unity. In fact, it feels a little ridiculous to have to say that this campaign was not won by some imaginary monolithic Muslim bloc that had forced its voters to get firmly behind the party led by a gay Jewish man with a white woman candidate. The reality was that at the heart of it was the candidate herself. Spencer, 34, left school at 16 and has worked as a plumber ever since, even qualifying as a plasterer in the middle of this campaign. She is not a politics graduate who arrived by the usual routes; she is, as she put it in her victory speech, someone who knows what it means to do a job like hers and to deserve a seat at the table.
That authenticity defined the whole campaign. All parties admittedly ran operations heavy on attack and counter-attack, but the defining factor was an element of freedom and joy in the Green campaign, Spencer said herself: “We ran a hopeful campaign… we have shown that we don’t have to accept being turned against each other.” When the Daily Mail ran a front page branding the Greens a “Green Menace,” Spencer and Polanski embraced it, turning it into a badge of honour, and campaigners were soon wearing it as a slogan. Those I spoke to described something rare in modern by-election politics: a campaign people actually wanted to be part of.
The party’s CEO, Harriet Lamb, told the media that almost 2,000 Green supporters had been on the ground as voters went to the polls, a figure that would have seemed fanciful for a party of the Greens’ size even two years ago. This was not, however, the hyper-localised, pavement-by-pavement model that the Liberal Democrats have refined which has quietly stalled in its ambition. Polanski, a former Lib Dem himself, even said they are “a warning of what not to do”. What the Greens are aiming to do is something more expansive, a nationally driven surge with local roots, built on a simple and clear message. They stood on a national platform of lowering bills, rebuilding public services and protecting our NHS, and that’s what worked here.
Labour’s strategic missteps and rejection of Reform
Which brings you to the counterfactual that haunted Labour’s campaign from the start. “Brand Burnham does miles better than Labour among Conservative, Green and Reform voters,” and a Burnham candidacy could have swung the seat back to Labour by as many as seven percentage points, according to modelling from data journalist Ben Walker. The Labour NEC’s decision to block him to protect the mayoralty was, in the cold light of the result, an act of self-defeating caution. As Walker noted after Spencer’s win, “knowing almost half of those that vote Green nationally look upon the Manchester mayor favourably will likely be a sore point for beleaguered Labour campaigners after a gruelling and, at times, abusive election campaign.”
The Greens benefited from that miscalculation but it would be wrong to reduce Spencer’s victory to a gift. Reform’s candidate had his own local credibility problem, Goodwin studied at the University of Salford and delivered pizzas in Burnage as a student, but he lives in Hertfordshire, and opposition were quick to frame him as a national media figure parachuted into a community he did not represent. What Spencer offered in contrast was the opposite, a Greater Manchester lifer, a working plumber, and a Trafford councillor. Someone who was exactly who the Greens needed to be. The candidate mattered and in this case, it may have mattered more than anything else.
What the result means
“This is our 127th target seat,” Polanski told BBC Breakfast just hours after the result, adding the victory showed “there’s no no-go areas for the Green Party.” Owen Jones, writing in The Guardian, put it more starkly: “If Polanski’s party can capture one of Labour’s safest seats, then no Labour MP can feel secure.”
Clearly, every party has takeaways. Labour’s signals have been contradictory at best. In a letter to his MPs, Starmer branded the Greens’ politics “divisive” and “extreme,” insisting they were “not the harmless environmentalists they pretend to be” and lacked the “resources, the activist base or the local knowledge to replicate this victory” at a general election. The backbenches told a different story. “The result is cataclysmically bad for us,” one Labour minister told The Guardian. “It will obviously intensify calls for Keir to make moves to the progressive wing, but the calls will be to do it now.” Angela Rayner, more simply, called it “a wake-up call.”
Then there was Goodwin, who, having finished second, claimed the Greens’ coalition was one “of Islamists and woke progressives that came together to dominate a constituency.” A senior Labour strategist offered the most withering response: “People turn out against us in droves and they are extremist? I do not think anyone believes that the Greens are extremists.” It was meant as a rebuke to Starmer. It landed, inadvertently, as one for Goodwin too. Reform finished second here and recently lost to Plaid Cymru in Wales, two defeats at the hands of organised progressive movements that sit awkwardly with the party’s unstoppable momentum narrative.
With just over 2 months until the local elections, the Greens have already said they intend to do it all over again, and on current form you’d be a fool to doubt them.
All photos by Noah Buckingham Reed.
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