Controversial left-wing firebrand George Galloway has won the Rochdale by-election.
The former Labour MP and Celebrity Big Brother contestant, who was standing for the Workers Party of Britain, won 12,335 votes, a majority of 5,697.
Independent candidate David Anthony Tully came in second with 6,638 votes, followed by Conservative runner Paul Ellison with 3,731.
Labour had been expected to win the seat until its campaign was thrown into disarray by leaked recordings of their candidate Azhar Ali making alleged antisemitic comments, obtained by the Daily Mail.
Mr Galloway campaigned heavily on the Palestinian cause in Gaza, aiming to use the issue to mobilise Muslim voters in Rochdale.
Rival candidate Simon Danczuk, representing Reform UK, accused Mr Galloway of being divisive and said he would be the “MP for Gaza” rather than the Greater Manchester town.
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Mr Danczuk himself previously represented the seat as a Labour MP but was barred from standing for the party in 2017 after apologising for “inappropriate” text messages sent to a 17-year-old girl.
Guy Otten, the Green Party candidate, also had party support withdrawn over comments made on social media but his name still appeared on the ballot paper.
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Rochdale is one of the most deprived towns in England and has been the subject of grooming gang scandals in recent years, with a major report in January concluding that young girls were left “at the mercy” of paedophiles due to failings by senior police and council bosses.
Residents in the constituency likened the by-election to a “pantomime” and told Sky News they felt there were no credible candidates for what they called “the forgotten corner of England”.
The contest was triggered by the death of Labour stalwart Sir Tony Lloyd, who passed away in January following a battle with leukaemia.
The campaign was expected to be relatively straightforward for Labour until it emerged Mr Ali had suggested Israel was complicit in the massacre of its own people in the Hamas attacks on 7 October last year.
He apologised for the remarks, but further reports emerged that he had blamed “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” for the suspension of a pro-Palestinian MP – prompting Labour to withdraw support for him.
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Reform UK now has more members than the Conservative Party and is “the real opposition” according to Nigel Farage, while Kemi Badenoch has called his numbers “fake”.
According to a digital counter on the party’s website, Reform UK had gone past 131,690 members – the amount the Conservative Party declared before its leadership election in the autumn – just before midday on Boxing Day.
Mr Farage, party leader and MP for Clacton-on-Sea, hailed the “historic moment” and said on X: “The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world. Reform UK are now the real opposition.”
But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused the party of issuing misleading figures: “Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas eh, Nigel?. It’s not real. It’s a fake… [the website has been] coded to tick up automatically.”
Posting on X, she added that the Tories had “gained thousands of new members since the leadership election”.
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Reform UK also shared a video of the membership tracker being projected on to the Conservative Party headquarters in London overnight.
Zia Yusuf, party chairman, also said “history has been made today” and that the Tories’ “centuries-long stranglehold on the centre-right of British politics” has “finally been broken”.
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Mr Farage hit back at Ms Badenoch, who strongly contested Reform UK’s figures. He claimed to have proof and posted a screenshot of an online register reportedly showing ‘active memberships’.
“We understand you are bitter, upset and angry that we are now the second biggest party in British politics, and that the Conservative brand is dying under your leadership. However, this not an excuse to accuse us of committing fraud,” he wrote on X.
Mr Yusuf added to the debate by appearing to goad Ms Badenoch about an audit: “We will gladly invite a Big 4 audit firm to verify our membership numbers on the basis that you do the same.”
The Conservative party membership figure – shared after Kemi Badenoch was announced as the new leader on 2 November – was the lowest on record and a drop from the 2022 leadership contest, when there were around 172,000 members.
In response, a Conservative Party spokesman said: “Reform has delivered a Labour Government that has cruelly cut winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners, put the future of family farming and food security at risk, and launched a devastating raid on jobs which will leave working people paying the price.
“A vote for Reform this coming May is a vote for a Labour council – only the Conservatives can stop this.”
According to research from the House of Commons Library, there is no uniformly recognised definition of party membership and no established method or body to monitor the number of members each political group has.
Reform UK was also originally set up as a limited company, but Mr Farage said he would change the party’s structure to be member-owned in September.