Editorial: Andy Burnham has won an impressive local mandate but he will soon be presiding over the UK's immense political, financial and cultural problems

​In the end, Labour’s Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election easily.​

Not only did he have a majority of 9,000 votes over Nigel Farage's Reform UK, he would have sailed back to Westminster even if all the parties of the right - Restore, Reform and the Tories - had united around a single candidate. That would have brought them up to a combined 19,000 votes, well behind his tally of 24,000.

This is a triumph for Labour, which Mr Burnham will almost certainly soon lead. When the party is being thrashed in other elections, the voters of Makerfield confirmed Mr Burnham's reputation as a vote winner.

He could easily have been unpopular in the greater Manchester area after being mayor there, but on the contrary he is popular. Keir Starmer, sadly for him, is not. The wider UK public thinks Sir Keir ill-suited to being prime minister, which he is - not least because he has no political instincts, and has a managerial approach to government when we need a bold visionary.

Mr Burnham, however, will be tested by fire. Britain has enormous problems, such as with its huge debt, on mass immigration, on the possible break-up of the UK, on collapsing public services and on the need for radically more defence spending at a time of global threats. His charisma alone will not get him through these storms.

Meanwhile, there was a major victory for the Tories in Scotland. The party won a Westminster by-election in Abderdeen South after the SNP MP stood down. That constituency has a larger Tory vote than most Scottish seats, but even so has swung to the Conservatives in unexpectedly big numbers. The SNP is disgraced after the fraud conviction of Nicola Sturgeon's husband (she depicted herself as a victim after the scandal). Meanwhile, Aberdeen voters see the idiocy in banning new North Sea drilling. UK politics is badly fractured now.