The part of east Manchester that much of the country struggled to point out on a map until now, has been described by some, including candidates, as hosting a proxy vote on Keir Starmer’s premiership. Triggered amid Westminster scandals, the by-election crystallised the anger felt in Manchester at the London-centric, secretive and increasingly sleaze-tainted No 10 operation. This anger became rock-hard when the Labour NEC scuppered the short-lived candidacy of Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham. And the fundamental reason for the by-election is shrouded in silence.
With Reform looming large and fielding a right-wing heavy hitter, the progressive vote picked itself up, licked its wounds, and walked over to the Greens. It was a tense, close run vote, but on Thursday a clear picture emerged. Hannah Spencer, a young Mancunian plumber and local Green councillor in Hale (residents will defiantly tell you it’s Cheshire), took the seat beating Reform by more than 4,400 and Labour by more than 5,600 votes.
Hannah Spencer had, unsuccessfully, run for Greater Manchester mayor in the 2024 election, losing out by almost 375,000 votes. For Labour, relegated out of its historically very safe seat in Gorton and Denton to third place, this was a tragic own goal. The Greens’ appeal to hope and inclusion and Reform’s appeal to anger and nativism swept up half of Labour’s 2024 votes.
In an emotional victory speech Hannah Spencer vowed “I will always work hard for you, and I will always be honest, and I will always be decent”. She pledged to work for both the “white working class” people of Gorton and Denton and its Muslim community, threatened by Reform, that had rallied behind the Greens.
The worlds “honest” and “decent” resonate far beyond Manchester as sleaze grips the Starmer administration and the Labour Together think tank that had run the party operation from No 10. So does the Greens’ warning about corporate capture.
The crash and burn
In Westminster, Labour will be licking its wounds as Reform gloats over its self-defeating choice to block Burnham, Labour’s most popular operator, to protect an unpopular PM.
Amid mounting discontent with Starmer, the idea had floated in Labour circles since the 2025 party conference that a Manchester MP would step down to enable Burnham, the popular and ambitious “King of the North”, to return to Parliament and mount a leadership challenge. A new group of Labour MPs, called Mainstream, billed as “radical realists” had been amassing behind the Burnham candidacy.
After denials from other quarters, the incumbent MP materialised in the shape of Andrew Gwynne, a former health minister sacked and suspended last year over a series of offensive WhatsApp messages. As career ending as these messages should have been, Gwynne did not have to fall on his sword. He retired from his post with a large settlement, on medical grounds, citing ill-health. He had been suffering from Long Covid, a debilitating post-viral disease, ever since he caught Covid in March 2020.
A sensible step to protect his health from gruelling parliamentary schedules, Gwynne’s retirement was wasted as a selfless sacrifice. Burnham’s application to stand as a candidate was blocked as soon as he made his move. The NEC’s argument that letting Burnham run would have cost too much by triggering a mayoral contest went down in Manchester like a lead balloon, even before the government U-turned on the previously scrapped May local elections. On top of still needing to cover the legal bill from Reform’s lawsuit over the cancelled elections, the government is facing demands for funding from councils scrambling to now run them at short notice.
The doom and gloom, felt among the defeated Labour progressives, bordered on tragic as right-wing GB News pundit Matthew Goodwin, picked as Reform candidate for Gorton and Denton, circled the wagons. The more his views emerged, from girls’ alleged child-bearing duties and women’s alleged over-representation in academia to racial eugenics, the gloomier February looked. But there is no Shakespearean tragedy without a farce.
The Gorton and Denton by-election campaign had featured every jiggery-pokery imaginable: from fake “concerned pensioner” letters sent out by Reform (kindly saved from a high court punishment by an obliging if allegedly lackadaisical printer) to a fake “tactical voting” poll from Labour, to the Lib Dem-style artistic chart scaling of “only Greens can beat Reform” leaflets. All served with a generous dose of mutual recriminations. There were second helpings of hyperbole and reports of a Labour van blaring out “Green Madness” outside a polling station on voting day.
Yet at the heart of this show, is the thing we don’t want to talk about, and the vow of silence on it, even though it is ever present in our 2020s lives, like any Shakespearean ghost even when it’s offstage. This by-election ultimately happened because of Covid.
The farce, unfolded
The outgoing MP, Andrew Gwynne, is one of millions of people in this country living with Long Covid. Though the Office for National Statistics has stopped counting, GP surveys in England suggest over 4% of the population, around 3 million people are affected, and possibly as many as 1 in 10. In 2024, nearly 112,000 children and teenagers in England and Scotland were recorded with Long Covid, a figure that had already doubled in the preceding year.
Gwynne had been one of the few MPs to speak openly about Long Covid, until he became a minister in a government that reverted to the early 2020 orthodoxy that mass infection would deliver herd immunity, despite around 1 in 10 infections leading to Long Covid, and despite mounting evidence of airborne transmission. By 2023, even the Tory government had upgraded Commons ventilation with HEPA filtration, and some Whitehall offices followed. Yet, in 2026, calls to extend similar measures to schools nationwide were ignored by the same Labour education secretary who had once demanded action in opposition, despite evidence that better air quality reduces infection and improves attendance.
And so briefly, in 2024, we had a minister for public health, still battling symptoms of Long Covid, suddenly repeating the mantra that Covid was “not primarily transmitted by aerosols”, despite all evidence to the contrary. Months into his tenure, in January 2025, Gwynne was pulled up on this by aerosol experts and Long Covid charities alike.
And then something happened. Among the patient community on X (self-titled MedTwitter) an anonymous video circulated, calling out Gwynne’s lack of action and denial of airborne Covid. This backlash landed on fertile ground among people living with Long Covid and no treatment, who had looked to Gwynne to champion their rights to healthcare and disability support. This coincided with the Mail on Sunday unearthing Gwynne’s incendiary WhatsApps from years earlier in a group called TriggerMeTimbers. These included an anti-Israel joke, hostile comments about constituents, and crude comments about Diane Abbott and Angela Rayner. Within days, Gwynne was sacked as health minister, and suspension from the Labour party followed.
There was little sympathy within the patient community or the wider public for his self-inflicted downfall. But in between the TriggerMeTimbers scandal unseating a minister who had come under pressure to speak up for patients, and his retirement as an MP, triggering a by-election, the UK arrived at what we have now: deafening silence on Covid.
The silence
Health Secretary Wes Streeting, once vocal about making it safe to “Live with Covid” , has said nothing about it since 2024. There was an investigation into the Covid procurement VIP lane scandal and swift compensation for limited vaccine injury, but millions of people living with Long Covid found themselves sidelined. Unlike the vaccine injury group, Streeting never met the Covid bereaved, Long Covid sufferers or affected families. After Gwynne’s firing, sympathetic MPs formed a cross-bench All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Long Covid. They can ask questions and receive stock answers, but unlike ministers, they lack the statutory power to act.
The NHS Covid vaccination programme, the Sunak government’s sole Covid defence, continued under Gwynne with reduced access, and has since been stripped to the bone. By Autumn 2025, eligibility was restricted to over 75s, older care home residents and a narrow group of immunosuppressed patients, excluding pregnant women, healthcare workers, carers, and most clinically vulnerable people. Boosters cost nearly £100 privately, and parts of the UK have become vaccine deserts. This contrasts with public vaccination programmes continuing in other European countries, including Ireland. The next time a politician or a news pundit rants about the UK’s declining health versus EU countries, maybe we should ask why.
Gwynne was quickly replaced as a minister for preventative health by Ashley Dalton, formerly parliamentary private secretary to Wes Streeting. Since her appointment, she has mentioned Covid only in response to Long Covid APPG questions, usually citing funding or clinics established under the previous government. Research by Long Covid Support and Long Covid Kids found that nearly two-thirds of clinics operating in 2024 had closed by 2025. In Greater Manchester plans for a joint Long Covid and ME service are on hold pending funding cuts. When aerosol scientists told the Covid Inquiry that healthcare settings require proper PPE and clean air, Dalton continued to deny that Covid is airborne.
The message from Westminster is simple: “Covid is over”. Rising mental illness, worklessness among young people, and developmental delays in children are blamed on a few weeks of lockdown five years ago. How lockdowns can affect children born afterwards is a question even the Children’s Commissioner for England does not ask. But then she’s never met children with Long Covid and, unlike commissioners in the devolved nations, never spoke up for Covid-injured children or clinically vulnerable families at the inquiry.
What is unsaid
Meanwhile, more people are developing Long Covid from repeated infections. The risk rises with reinfection, and without even simple mitigations such as masks or clean air, everyone is basically playing Russian roulette. Even when the acute illness is mild, Long Covid is not. It can damage the heart, kidneys, brain and blood vessels. So-called “brain fog” is increasingly linked to markers of dementia. Its most misunderstood symptom is energy dysfunction, which leaves the body running on a broken battery, worsened by activity and unable to recharge. Alongside downplaying this as “fatigue”, there is currently no NHS treatment for Long Covid.
A 2023 TUC survey carried out in partnership withLong Covid Support found that one in seven people with Long Covid had lost their jobs. National figures still aren’t tracked. Frontline workers were hardest hit, a third from health or social care and another third from education. Most reported discrimination at work, and nearly two in three had no access to welfare. Unlike Andrew Gwynne MP, most people losing careers to Long Covid don’t get a golden goodbye.
In 2025 the Labour government attempted to implement disability welfare cuts previously stalled under the Conservatives. A rebellion of Labour MPs temporarily blocked restrictions to Personal Independence Payment, a non-means-tested, in-work support. Some Universal Credit cuts were also resisted, but new claimants will see the health component halved to £50 a week and face stricter conditionality, as eligibility for the LCWRA category is narrowed. This is the hostile environment awaiting newly disabled people in 2026.
You may think you don’t know anyone with Long Covid, but statistically you probably do. It might be the friend you haven’t seen in a year, the colleague retiring early, or the neighbour who suddenly suffered a heart attack or stroke, not “the jabs”, but Covid. It could be the parent who entered hospital for routine surgery and left struggling to breathe and mixing up names. The teenager now in a wheelchair. The driver with poor spatial awareness. Or the woman still wearing a mask, absorbing the stares on the high street.
“Living with Covid”
As Gorton and Denton went to the polls, something else was happening in Westminster: the Covid Inquiry was drawing towards its conclusion in March. Amid near total silence it heard shocking testimonies of betrayal: of healthcare workers sent into wards without adequate PPE; of children repeatedly infected in poorly ventilated classrooms while families were penalised for absence; of frontline workers losing careers to Long Covid while governments branded them “economically inactive” and cut disability support. This week, clinically vulnerable people described being unable to access education, work or healthcare safely in 2026.
The Inquiry’s scope ends in 2023, but the “Live with Covid” mantra continues to this day – its retrospective evidence describing present reality. Even as polls rank the NHS as voters’ top concern, public health is being abandoned. We all pay for it with “corridor care”. People are going to hospitals for treatment of illnesses such as cancer, only to catch Covid on wards where not even health workers mask. Some don’t come out alive. Most hospital-treated Covid cases are caught in hospital. Somehow clean air, that Florence Nightingale called for as an infection prevention measure in 1856, has become controversial in 2026. Masks worn by healthcare workers during the Spanish flu epidemic are absent from wards today. The UK has lost its measles-free status – the price of pandering to vaccine mistrust.
The evidence to the Covid Inquiry from 2020-2022 is not abstract, backdated testimonies: this is our country today. The increasingly sick, tired, disabled, unemployed and angry country deserting the political centre that had failed it and trying its luck with the fringes.
This is the country that went to the polls in Gorton and Denton, narrowly beating the narrative of division that exploits a pandemic aftermath. The country that will go to the polls in May. And if silence remains policy, it will be a sicker, poorer and angrier country going into the General Election in 2029. Perhaps into a tragedy with elements of farce.
But today hope won. The Green Party is the only UK party with a dedicated policy on Covid and Long Covid, written in collaboration with clinical experts. And one strong message from the byelection is: choose Covid complacency and complicity, and you lose.
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