Bev Craig to stand as Labour candidate for Greater Manchester mayor

Leader of city council braces for bitter fight with Reform UK in byelection for Andy Burnham’s replacement

Labour’s candidate to replace Andy Burnham as Greater Manchester mayor has been named as Bev Craig, the leader of the city council.

Burnham, who could be prime minister in under four weeks, is expected to campaign heavily for Labour in a tight contest with Reform UK on 30 July.

As many as 2 million people will be eligible to vote in the Greater Manchester byelection, making it the biggest in modern times in British politics.

Craig, 41, has long been seen as a rising star within Labour and took over Manchester city council in 2021 at the age of 36, becoming only the third holder of the office in four decades and its first woman.

Like many council leaders, however, she remains little-known to ordinary voters. A huge publicity blitz will pitch her as continuing the work of Burnham, who won the 2024 contest with nearly two-thirds of the vote and a 351,000-vote majority.

However, Labour figures are braced for a bitter dogfight with Reform UK after losing more than 100 seats across Greater Manchester in May’s elections.

Reform UK won 106 seats in the area’s 10 local authorities, including 18 out of 19 contested in Tameside, 24 out of 25 in Wigan and seven on Manchester city council.

Nigel Farage’s party has not yet named its candidate but the frontrunner is Dan Barker, a nuclear industry project manager who came fourth with 7.5% of the vote in the 2024 mayoral election.

In 2024, Reform finished nearly 4,000 votes ahead of the Green party’s Hannah Spencer, who won the Gorton and Denton byelection in February.

The Greens, who unveiled their candidate as Trafford councillor Geraldine Coggins, have pitched the battle to replace Burnham as a contest between its party and Reform UK.

Rupert Lowe’s hardline rightwing Restore Britain is expected to try to make the campaign a fight over grooming gangs, an issue that scarred communities in Oldham and Rochdale, and over which it has garnered influential support from Elon Musk, the trillionaire owner of X.

Its candidate, mental health nurse Marlon West, is the father of grooming gang victim Scarlett.

Craig has spoken of her childhood in council housing in Greenisland, about seven miles north of Belfast, before moving to Manchester in 2003.

She was awarded an Order of the British Empire in December for services to local government – a commendation for which she is understood to have received a congratulatory call from Keir Starmer.

Craig told the Manchester Evening News in 2021 that when she came out as gay at the age of 14, “everyone told me my life would be a disaster, nobody would love me” and that she did not want to be “pigeonholed” by being the first woman or openly gay leader of Manchester city council.

She said at the time: “I don’t want to be pigeonholed, to just be invited to panels to talk about how it feels like to be a woman. Talk to me about my economic policy, talk about inclusive growth, transport, infrastructure, business, like the stuff that I enjoy reading about.”