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Notes -
I agree with your critique of the OP, good to have the Manchester context in there. I would strongly caveat the Makersfield point: besides Burnham being a good campaigner and having the party apparatus focused on it, voters just really really like having the PM be their MP. Wouldn't you like it if your House rep was the President? Reform also ran a disaster-class of a campaign (possibly a sign of the future, possibly a one-off).
Re: a working Burnhamism, I think the London class are a problem for him in a different way than pure opposition. A working Burnhamism would be purely pragmatic, but the London types are already surrounding him with a "brain trust" that will try to make some ideology out of it, and that ideology will always happen to favour the status quo and the QUANGO/NGO/Civil Service/media blob who provide the "brains". I doubt that Burnham has the ability to bulldoze through court politics like that.
They had a candidate who was as thick as pigshit (believing that "let's nominate the local plumber" was a simple way of hacking by-elections in the Manchester suburbs) and had a history of obnoxiously sexist social media posts. But I didn't notice the campaign as such (which, like most potentially winning by-election campaigns, was run by Farage's people) going badly wrong in ways which weren't simply candidate quality.
If he can, it will be by enlisting the Labour Party in the country outside London as an ally against the Deep State. Some of Starmer's silliest failures, with the Chagos deal being the one that gets talked about on the Motte, involve not pushing back against dumb ideas coming out of the Deep State. Five minutes talking to backbenchers representing provincial seats would stop a PM who was in touch with his Party making those mistakes.
Apologies for being unclear - standing a terrible candidate, then realizing it and trying to hide them, was what I meant by a disaster-class that might be a one-off (because it doesn't generalize to races with better candidates). I can't speak to the mechanics of the campaign.
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