There was plenty of the hopey, changey stuff from Andy Burnham at his victory rally on the morning after the night before – but it ended with the new MP for Makerfield doing a runner. “Are you going to become the new prime minister?” shouted Sky’s political editor, Beth Rigby, at the retreating Burnham. “Keir Starmer says he is not going to give way – what’s your message for Keir Starmer?”

Hemmed in by cameras, chairs, tables, and a whole load of the giggling supporters who had been assembled around him on the turf at Ashton Town FC’s grounds, Burnham picked up the pace.

He skipped nimbly past the temporary toilets and weaved through the photographers and the beer garden benches, keeping his gaze firmly away from the chasing TV cameras all the while. It turned into a pretty urgent trot that might even be described as a jog. With Burnham’s vanishing act began what has every appearance of being a strange sort of interregnum in British politics, as authority drifted from one man to the next, after a challenge made in deed, if not in words.

An hour or so later, Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, who has been managing Burnham’s campaign in Makerfield, laid out in crystal-clear terms what her candidate had been shy of saying directly.

“I hope the prime minister takes the weekend to really reflect on the result here,” said Haigh. “Listen to soundings from the cabinet and from the PLP [parliamentary Labour party], as all the evidence suggests that a contest would be brutal, it would be unpleasant and it would be very unlikely the PM would win.”

Did Burnham have a leadership campaign ready to go if Starmer refuses to move? Her answer was straightforward: “Yes”.

It is not only the fact of Burnham’s win but the scale of it that had many of his supporters convinced on Friday that a coronation, rather than a contest, was the only course of action. Burnham’s madcap escape from the inevitable questions was about allowing Starmer his own dignified way out.

Burnham won the seat with a majority of 9,231 – nearly double that enjoyed by his predecessor, Josh Simons, in 2024. With 54% of the vote, he finished about 20 percentage points ahead of Reform, despite Nigel Farage’s party’s vote share rising by 9.61% from the general election. The former health secretary Wes Streeting – remember him? – posted on social media his congratulations. “It gives us all hope that Labour can still win, but Andy’s campaign is proof that to do so we need to change,” said the rival leadership hopeful.

Understandably, but rather unconvincingly, Starmer sought to own the victory on Friday morning in an interview with broadcasters and in a call to party officials. The sweeping victory in Makerfield was evidence that the “tide is turning on Reform”, Starmer said, as he endured a fresh round of broadcast reporters telling him he was “finished”.

“Let’s pull together as a party and a movement,” the prime minister added, betraying none of his inner emotions, as he insisted the result was a “very good outcome”. “The one thing we’ve got to avoid doing is plunging our party and our country into chaos by turning on each other and tearing apart our party and our movement,” he said. “That has never worked. That’s what the last government did. We need to learn that lesson.”

Confronted again about his parlous position, Starmer added: “If there is a contest, then yes, I will stand. I have said repeatedly, I am not going to walk away from that.”

One No 10 adviser said that it wasn’t a bluff. There were “enough people around the prime minister still who want to back him to fight”, they added. “There are no men in grey suits, or at least not ones he thinks are worth listening to.”

In a social media post filmed in an undisclosed field far, far away from reporters’ pesky questions, Farage too was putting the best gloss he could on it. He was “disappointed”, but urged voters who voted for the rival party on the right, Restore Britain, who secured just short of 7% of the vote in Makerfield, to “think again”. “As for the Reform vote share, well, I thought we would get 18,000 votes, we got just shy of 16,000, so I’m disappointed by that, no question about it,” he said.

It was only an hour after the polls closed at 10pm on Thursday night that the scale of the victory had become clear to Burnham’s inner circle. Holed up in the Edge convention centre in Wigan, his closest aides could see they were on course for a significant victory after sampling boxes of ballots showed they were ahead in the “vast majority” of wards.

Five miles south in Stubshaw Cross, in the old Labour club that became Burnham’s campaign HQ (while also carrying on its normal business and hosting a wedding, funeral, christening and birthday party during the campaign – all of which the would-be prime minister attended), his team had refused to believe their data suggesting that 65% of voters canvassed had promised to back their man.

But, shortly after midnight, word filtered through that they were on course for a victory that was “beyond our wildest dreams”, as one Burnham staffer described it. “Lisa [Nandy] was funny, she just couldn’t stop grinning,” said one Labour source. “You try and stay composed before the result comes but some people have got better game faces than others.”

Soon after, there was a rumour among the Labour ranks that Farage had already left Makerfield – although a Reform UK spokesperson insisted at the time he was still in the area. At about 1.30am, Jon Burns, one of Farage’s key aides, strode up to a senior Labour organiser and offered his congratulations. The private handshake was taken as the concession and by 4am, the party was in full swing in Stubshaw cross.

According to those who attended, Burnham walked in with his family and immediately commandeered the playlist, putting on New Order’s Your Silent Face – the soon-to-be ex-mayor’s choice “when I want to be in running mode” – and a somewhat eclectic mix of Dua Lipa, the Smiths and Oasis.

The Downing Street heir-apparent circled the room hugging supporters, thanking them for their efforts over the mammoth four-week campaign during which Labour canvassers knocked on every door seven times. “It wasn’t raucous, but there were a lot of Cruzcampos,” said one attender, adding that there was “a suggestion of karaoke but thankfully that didn’t come to pass”.

The celebrations ended at 6am with the sun firmly up on a bright summer morning. Four hours later, many of them were at Ashton Town’s football stadium, some wearing sunglasses and others nursing pints of lager, Guinness and mini bottles of champagne.

Burnham, casually dressed in a creamy-white polo shirt with gold zip, arrived looking pretty fresh-faced although his wife, Marie-France, resplendent in a polka dot top, took the precaution of hiding behind a pair of oversized sunglasses.

Directly behind Burnham, in the horse shoe-shaped crowd of his supporters facing the cameras, were Haigh and Anneliese Midgley MP, an adviser to Starmer in opposition but now a key organiser for Burnham. “This campaign was won by a band of strong northern power women,” Burnham said, perhaps in acknowledgment that in taking his place in Downing Street, he would continue Labour’s record of electing solely male leaders.

He praised his predecessor who had stood down for him in recognition of the seriousness of the local election results in May and the need for “change”. It was an act of “incredible selflessness”, Burnham said, although there is talk of Simons taking a Downing Street role.

“You have to respond to what people here are saying,” Burnham went on. He talked through some of his broad-stroke campaign themes: cutting water, energy and rail fairs and a focus on vocational education; a reindustrialisation of the north, and procurement that backed British businesses. It was a “new path” for the country he said. “This now is the change moment,” Burnham concluded, and everyone knew what he meant.