CHRISTIAN CALGIE: My spiky encounter with Burnham during a day on the stump with Reform’s plumber

Nigel Farage made his first appearance in the Makerfield campaign yesterday and said the race will be the most important byelection of his life.

The Reform UK leader was taken on a constituency tour, sitting in the front seat of a white van belonging to his candidate, plumber Robert Kenyon, who planned to thwart Andy Burnham’s bid to return to Westminster and completely dash his hopes of becoming Labor leader.

Joining Mr Farage and his entourage, the Daily Mail followed Mr Kenyon’s van in our own car for the tour – but we had a spectacular encounter and luckily bumped into Andy Burnham.

It’s fair to say he wasn’t at all pleased to see us.

Mr Farage was talking about how important the Makerfield by-election was; He turned to his young aspirant and joked: ‘No pressure!’

Farage said, ‘If Burham wins, he will be the next Prime Minister.’ ‘If we win, we will have a chance to win the next general election. That’s how huge it is; colossal!’

Then suddenly we came across the distinctively styled King in the North.

The encounter took place after Mr Farage was taken to the lake to see where Mr Kenyon enjoyed fishing, a hobby he shares with the party leader.

Mr Calgie (back left) chanced upon Mr Burnham while he was at a local café in Makerfield with Reform leader Nigel Farage.

But away from the tranquil woodland and lakeside views, Mr Farage spontaneously decided to pop into a local cafe for a drink.

Shortly after taking his seat, it turned out that Mr. Burnham was also in the cafe, just a few feet away, in a separate pergola by the front door.

It emerged that Mr Burnham was enjoying cakes and hot drinks while talking to young adults with special needs.

I was the only journalist there and became aware of his presence when Reform staff told me he was in the building. When he got up to leave, I decided to chat with him.

He didn’t seem to want to participate. In fact, he looked angry and angry: ‘You can’t enter a place like this without knowing! You’re disrupting the order there!’

When I said I was just on Nigel Farage’s campaign trail and the encounter was not planned, Mr Burnham angrily shouted: ‘I know who you are but you shouldn’t be doing this. You must have limits.

I’m not going to do ‘friendly, man, it’s one or the other’. You need to be told.’

I couldn’t understand why he was so angry, so I asked him if he had learned a lesson from Donald Trump by making personal attacks on journalists for doing their jobs.

‘The press doesn’t get in like that,’ he replied. ‘If you are going with the media and political party, do not enter such a place.’

And when I asked yesterday about the statement on the Daily Mail’s front page – that Mr Burnham once said that trans men who identify as women should be able to use women’s toilets – and whether he still believed it, he replied again: ‘You’re out of line.’

Meanwhile, a member of Mr Burnham’s entourage tried to stop a Daily Mail photographer from taking pictures of the testy showdown.

I soon learned that the cafe supports young adults aged 19-25 and offers training to help them participate in real life.

Nigel Farage was in the Makerfield constituency on Wednesday to tour the area with Reform candidate Rob Kenyon.

According to the latest polls, the race starts on a knife edge. Makerfield is a Reform heartland, unlike recent by-elections in Gorton and Denton

I can understand how this might make our presence on the campaign trail seem insensitive.

But reform staff insisted that a café in the constituency was a perfectly suitable venue for a campaign break, and I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong. I found Mr. Burnham’s overreaction to my presence unusual to say the least.

Whatever the reason for his discomfort, I felt it was a fascinating insight into the tensions in the by-election campaign, which Mr Farage believes is the most important campaign in modern political history.

It is an issue that Mr Kenyon, who can trace his family back to the constituency for 200 years and is on the Reform ticket in the 2024 election, is still working on.

Just yesterday morning he had been busy doing plumbing work, installing two radiators, when he received a call from his party demanding he drop everything and prepare for a grueling five-week campaign against Labour’s most popular politician.

Asked how it felt to be thrust into such a dazzling political spotlight, he joked: ‘I’ve been thinking about it for the last few days. Can I come back to you? You know how they say there are people who seek greatness and impose it on themselves. ‘I’m very impressed.’

According to the latest polls, the race starts on a knife edge. Makerfield is the Reform heartland, unlike the recent Gorton and Denton by-elections.

Driving through his hometown in the back of Mr Kenyon’s minibus, it was difficult to spot a single street without at least one Union Flag or St George’s Cross waving among the lampposts and draped in the windows of terraced houses.

If Labor had chosen to field an unknown candidate, Mr Farage would have been extremely confident of marching to victory.

But Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is threatening to mount a fight that Reform cannot afford to remain indifferent to.

And Mr Farage warned that if Andy Burnham wins the race he will ‘push Labor further down the path of profligacy that markets will hate’.

‘Burnham says ‘Vote for me to change Labor’; Rob says ‘vote for me to change the country’.’

He accused Mr Burnham of posing a ‘threat’ to Britain’s economy, borders and women’s rights, following revelations in the Daily Mail yesterday about the mayor’s views on single-sex toilets and spaces.

Reform frames the race as ‘David versus Goliath’ and accuses Mr Burnham of being ‘the ultimate, brilliant career politician’

While he is optimistic about the chances of reform, the campaign has been marred by allegations about his candidate’s use of social media.

Reform chief blasts: ‘He’s much worse on policy than Starmer. The truth is that he is a more Left version of Starmer, but not unlike him; Look at how he made a U-turn on everything.

Even in the last week he interrupts and changes his thoughts. “They are not dissimilar people.”

Reform frames the race as ‘David versus Goliath’ and accuses Mr Burnham of being the ‘ultimate, quintessential career politician’, unlike Mr Kenyon’s blue-collar career in business, the army and as an NHS technician.

Posing next to his man outside Reform’s local headquarters, Mr Farage (who is a foot shorter than his modest candidate) looked up and joked: ‘The problem is, we say it’s David versus Goliath, and he is Goliath!’

The pair’s first stop was to visit the field located next door to the Wigan Warriors’ rugby league stadium, where Mr Kenyon’s first job was a grueling plumbing job in a freezing-cold factory at night and his “first love”.

The candidate has now had to warn his friends that they won’t be able to join them at Wembley for this year’s final in ten days.

Next came my encounter with Mr Burnham in the café, and Nigel Farage had his own views on the matter: ‘For too long Andy Burnham has had things his own way… his greatest weakness is his perceived sense of entitlement. That’s how he treated you.’

While he is optimistic about the chances of reform, the campaign has been marred by allegations about his candidate’s use of social media.

Mr Kenyon was condemned by Labor after it was revealed he had befriended a far-right leader on Facebook.

And the Conservative Party raised questions about his tweets after it was revealed his account had been suspended by X.

But Mr Farage defended his candidate with all his might. And Mr Kenyon insisted he had no idea who the far-right leader was when he added himself as a friend and claimed he was accepting hundreds of friend requests a day during the election to help spread Reformation’s message.

Mr Farage had little time to engage with voters in the first round of seats, but some people who spoke to the Daily Mail suggested even Mr Burnham could fail to win them over.

Malcolm, 69, highlighted the local clean air zone Mr Burnham is trying to set up in Manchester on a £100m budget, claiming it would cost him £60 per journey just to drive his caravan down the street.

Paul, 55, said his entire family would support Mr Kenyon but Burnham was a ‘good second-row’ option.

Although the Daily Mail found a Labor supporter insisting that not every local resident supports Reform UK, he admitted that his own party’s first two years in power will be a huge hurdle for even Mr Burnham to overcome.

Voters in Makerfield will have just five weeks to decide whether Mr Kenyon can switch from draining the radiators to draining the Westminster swamp.