Bev Craig was mid-squat at the gym when she was recognised for the first time as the prospective heir to Andy Burnham’s throne. Until recently, the Manchester city council leader could happily have gone about her workout in peace.
But all that changed when Burnham, who DJ’ed at her 40th birthday party last year, won the Makerfield byelection and set up another big electoral contest on his way to becoming prime minister.
The battle to replace Burnham as mayor of Greater Manchester has been overshadowed by events in Westminster, but when the region’s 2 million voters go to the polls this Thursday, it will mark the biggest byelection in British political history.
And, barring any last-minute campaign disaster, Craig, 41, will become the most powerful Labour woman outside Westminster.
“The world is looking to us. The country is looking to what we can achieve. Now is the moment in Greater Manchester to build a place that fights for us, that works for us and creates a future for all of us,” she said at a manifesto launch this month to a soundtrack of mid-90s Oasis, the Charlatans and Happy Mondays.
Two polls have given Labour a clear lead over Reform UK, which hopes to claim its biggest electoral coup yet after winning more than 100 council seats across Greater Manchester less than three months ago.
Yet with Nigel Farage’s focus shifting nearly 200 miles south-east to Clacton, where the Reform leader is fighting a self-imposed byelection over questions about his financial affairs, there are doubts as to whether the party will even finish second on Thursday.
The Green party is vying to turn its recent Manchester success into its first big seat of power in British politics. However, a YouGov poll published last week put Zack Polanski’s party in third place on 17% of the vote.
Party figures believe this significantly underestimates its support and that its campaign has been more visible than Labour’s, on the streets and online. One said: “There are still a large number of voters who are undecided, so there is everything to play for as we continue to ramp up our campaign in the final week.”
Prof Rob Ford, of the University of Manchester’s politics department, said it looked as if Burnham would “easily” pass his first electoral test as prime minister with a “straightforward Labour win”.
However, the real mark of success, he said, would be whether Labour was able to push back the Green tide in Manchester, where it made big gains in May as well as making inroads in Salford and Trafford. Labour will also be looking to close the gap on Reform UK in boroughs such as Wigan, the council of Burnham’s constituency, and Bolton, Bury and Tameside.
Like Burnham, Craig is an honorary Mancunian rather than born-and-bred. She moved to the city in 2003 at the age of 18, after growing up in a struggling town 7 miles north of Belfast. Unlike some politicians who like to burnish their working-class credentials, the diminutive Northern Irishwoman has kept them largely to herself.
It was a recent conversation with her mother, who still lives near Belfast, that persuaded her to reveal details about her childhood even her closest advisers did not know.
Money was scarce growing up on a council estate in Greenisland, Craig said. She thought it was normal to be “surrounded by poverty, addiction, poor mental health”. Her father, a car mechanic and panel beater, turned to drink after getting injured at work and being sacked. “Our world fell apart,” she said.
As the money problems worsened, Craig recalls being asked by her parents to help them understand their life insurance policy to see “if your dad ending his life would free the family from debt”.
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After studying politics and history at the University of Manchester, Craig joined the Labour party and became a councillor in 2011 for the ward where Liam and Noel Gallagher grew up. Ten years later, she was elected leader of the city council at the age of 36 – only the third holder of the office in four decades and its first woman – and later took on a role as Burnham’s economic adviser.
If elected as mayor, Craig will command the biggest mayoral authority outside London, with a £3bn budget and powers across housing, health, policing and transport.
Many in Labour circles believe Craig is a cabinet minister in the making. But she has turned down at least one opportunity to get to parliament, declining to stand in the Gorton and Denton byelection in February in which Labour was beaten heavily by the Greens.
The mayoral post is not a stepping stone to Westminster, she said, committing to standing again for a full term in 2028 if she is elected next week. “This, for me, is the dream job,” she said. “Anyone that doesn’t believe that shouldn’t be standing because it’s disrespectful to the people of Greater Manchester.”
Of all the 108 seats Labour lost across Greater Manchester in May, one of the most troubling for party figures was in a suburb of Sale, 6 miles south of the city centre.
It was in the relatively affluent ward of Brooklands, with its well-appointed Edwardian terraces and independent bookshops, that Reform UK won by just eight votes as a rejuvenated Green party split the leftwing vote.
Michelle Crosby, the owner of B for Butterfly Books, was backing Labour because of its promise of a high street fund to help small businesses. The Greens and Reform UK have both pledged to pour money into high streets, as well as tackling the chronic shortage of affordable housing, the cost of living, and crime.
“What I would like to see is fairness across the board, that we don’t just focus on the centre of Manchester,” said Crosby.
In the increasingly trendy Levenshulme, the centre of Green support, drama student Leo Powell said he started off “really liking” Burnham and that he had benefited from free bus travel to college.
However, the 20-year-old said he felt the Greens were “a bit less scared to stand for what they want to stand for” and that he would vote for their candidate, Geraldine Coggins. “I could take the easy option and just continue that with Bev Craig,” he said, “but I don’t see why we shouldn’t give it a go. I think Manchester’s the perfect kind of city for a Green mayor to thrive.”
