So a Labour MP has stepped down to give Andy Burnham the chance to stand in a by-election, and challenge for the Labour Party leadership if he manages to win it.

There are a couple of obvious talking points to get through first.

Will Starmer's minions in the Labour bureaucracy try to block him from standing again, like they did in the Gorton and Denton by-election?

If Burnham is blocked from standing again for factional reasons, it'd ring the death knell for the Labour Party, because whoever won the leadership election would be widely seen as an illegitimate leader, who won by vote rigging, rather than because they were the best candidate. Could the Labour-right faction be so stupid and self-destructive? Definitely. Will they though? Probably not.

Can Burnham actually win if the Labour right faction resist the urge to interfere?

Reform came in a fairly strong second place in Markfield at the last general election with 31% of the vote, but the Greens came in fifth and didn't even win their deposit back. Both of the insurgent political parties have gained popularity since then, especially the Greens, who won the Gorton and Denton by-election that the Labour right factionalists blocked Burnham from standing in.

Burnham can win the by-election. He's the most popular Labour politician in the country these days, and he's standing in his home turf of Manchester too. He's not a new face with no public recognition like the MP he's replacing was in 2024.

However if Burnham loses, it'd be a sign that the damage Starmer has done is so great that Labour is essentially finished as a major political party. If their most popular figure can't win in his home territory, which would give Markfield the prestige of having the probable next Prime Minister as their MP, it's hard to see how they could win anywhere.

Aside from these obvious talking points, it's very interesting that the MP who is standing down is Josh Simons, which is highly unexpected.

Simons is one of the Starmer loyalists who was rewarded in 2024 with a parliamentary safe seat that has been Labour held ever since the constituency was drawn up in the 1980s.

Simons was a key player in the Labour Together faction that backed the absolute pack of lies that constituted Starmer's Labour leadership campaign in 2020.

It was discovered that Labour Together unlawfully failed to declare £730,000 in donations between 2017 and 2020, and they did not take this revelation well.

They hired an American consultancy firm to spy on the investigative journalists who broke the story of their undeclared donations, and Simons was at the heart of this scandalous political attack on the journalists who had uncovered their corruption.

Simons didn't just hire a company to snoop on journalists either, he forwarded the findings of Labour Together's snooping on to GCHQ along with false allegations that the investigative journalists had "suspected links to Russian intelligence".

Simons is one of Starmer's minions, and he's a vicious one too, who tried to frame journalists as assets of the Russian secret services in revenge for their perfectly legitimate and warranted investigations into Labour Together.

So why is a member of the Starmer/Mandelson/McSweeney/Reeves/Streeting cabal resigning to make way for a Labour politician who is a threat to their cabal's control of the Labour Party?

Wes Streeting has just resigned as Health Secretary in preparation for a leadership bid, and then suddenly an MP from his own right-wing Labour Together faction has resigned to make way for a rival challenger. A challenger who this same cabal deliberately blocked from standing in Gorton and Denton just a few months ago!

What is going on?

Are we to take Simon's assertions at face value, that he's standing down after only two years as an MP out of concern for the Labour Party?

The more sceptical might conclude that a vicious political hatchet man like Simons suddenly standing down to make space for a factional political rival absolutely stinks of a backroom deal between Burnham and the right-wing faction who lumbered the party, and the country with Starmer.

If so, what has Burnham agreed to?