It’s a bit of a nightmare scenario for Sir Keir Starmer.
After the Runcorn and Helsby by-election last May, where Reform pipped Labour by just six votes, there was clamouring for the PM to do more to appeal to his party’s voters who were peeling off to the right wing.
After today’s result in Gorton and Denton, where the Green Party won more than 40% of the vote and pushed Labour into third place, there will be clamouring for him to do the same for voters who are peeling to the left.
Perhaps we’ll see the government change tack in the next few weeks to focus more unapologetically on tackling inequalities and supporting the worst off in society.
But perhaps that’s been the problem all along – those in power constantly shifting their approach based on their best estimate of where the country is sitting.
The sense of a leader who isn’t exactly sure what he wants, and who appears to be on a constant mission to work out what voters would like him to do.
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In losing one by-election to the populist right and one by-election to the populist left, Starmer might be left despairing about where to go next.
There’s one thing those two votes have in common, though: people rejected him.
Over the next few days, we’re going to see plenty of recriminations in Labour and elsewhere about what exactly happened in Gorton and Denton.
Some of those questions will be legitimate – the logic behind turning down the offer from Andy Burnham, the popular Mayor of Greater Manchester, for example.
And at this morning’s results announcement, nobody from the Green Party was able to satisfactorily explain what message they intended to send with leaflets depicting David Lammy alongside Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Starmer meeting Indian leader Narendra Modi.
We can also expect to hear a lot more about family voting, an illegal practice that election observer group Democracy Volunteers said was happening at ‘extremely high’ levels in the by-election.
However, there are much deeper and more fundamental questions Labour will be asking itself this morning.
Clearly, the Green Party has – in the six months since Zack Polanski became its leader – turned itself into true force to be reckoned with on the political stage.
Keir Starmer now faces a world where voters are being drawn towards charismatic leaders on both the right and left, who each want to see a radical reshaping of British society.
The PM told me explicitly at the beginning of the year that he doesn’t think such dramatic steps would be in the best interests of the country.
So the biggest challenge he faces now is coming up with a convincing argument why that is the case and, crucially, listening to voters when they explain why they might disagree.
With May’s local elections on the horizon, and the threat of a leadership challenge on the other side of that, Starmer’s future could come down to what he truly believes – and his ability to sell it.
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