Nigel Farage Fury: Reform UK Leader Makes 'Cheating' Claims After By-Election Loss

Nigel Farage didn't just lose a by-election in Greater Manchester this week—he lost his temper in public, then tried to relitigate the result in the language of grievance.​

Green Party's Hannah Spencer won the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election with 14,980 votes and a 4,402 majority; Reform UK came second on 10,578; Labour slumped into third on 9,364.

The 'Cheating' Charge

By breakfast-time, Farage was already framing the Gorton and Denton result as something murkier than a defeat, posting on X, 'This election was a victory for sectarian voting and cheating. Matt Goodwin was a great candidate for us.' He went on, 'Roll on the elections on May 7th. It will be goodbye Starmer and goodbye to the Tory party.'

That is the rhetorical trick Farage returns to when the numbers don't flatter him, if you didn't win, then someone must have fiddled. And, to be fair, there were genuine concerns being circulated on election night—though not in the melodramatic, end-of-Britain register Reform's leader prefers.

A volunteer monitoring group, Democracy Volunteers, said it observed 545 voters and recorded 32 cases of 'family voting,' including nine at a single polling station. 'Family voting' is the catch-all for situations where one person appears to influence another's vote—for example, by going into the booth with them.

Manchester City Council's acting returning officer—effectively the official in charge of administering the contest—flatly rejected the suggestion that polling staff had raised such issues on the day. In a statement carried by the BBC, a representative said staff were trained to spot undue influence and that 'no such issues' were reported, adding it was 'very disappointing' the claims emerged only after polls had closed.​

The Electoral Commission, meanwhile, swatted the matter back to first principles: 'Electoral offences are a matter for the police,' a spokesperson said, urging anyone who believes an offence occurred to report it. It's an unshowy reminder of how the UK system actually works—less viral outrage, more procedures, paperwork, and thresholds of evidence.​

A Green Breakthrough

Whatever Farage says, the headline fact remains: the Greens pulled off a historic win in a seat in Greater Manchester, with Spencer taking 14,980 votes and Reform's Matt Goodwin on 10,578, while Labour's Angeliki Stogia finished on 9,364. Sky News described it as the Green Party's first-ever victory in a parliamentary by-election and noted Spencer—34, and a plumber—became the party's fifth MP in Parliament. ITV Granada also highlighted Labour's collapse from 18,555 votes in the 2024 general election, despite a similarly high turnout.

A by-election is what Britain runs when a sitting MP's seat falls vacant between general elections, and it can be politically brutal because it compresses national anger into one small map-square. Gorton and Denton are now one of those map-squares—an argument about the cost of living, identity, and trust in institutions, fought street by street, then broadcast to the rest of the country as a kind of omen.

The Greens weren't subtle about what they thought Farage was doing. A party spokesperson accused him of trying to delegitimise a clear result, 'This is an attempt to undermine the democratic result and is straight out of the Trump playbook.' The same spokesperson pointed to the scale of the victory and took a swipe at Reform's funding, saying, 'We've just won a historic by-election by a comfortable margin. We've shown the country that Greens can beat Reform, despite their big business donations.'

Even inside Reform's own ranks, the temperature was noticeably cooler. The party's chair, Dr David Bull, said Reform accepted the result and asked whether the reports of illegal family voting had impacted the outcome, conceded: 'If I'm being candid, probably not.' That single line lands harder than any slogan—because it punctures the implication that 'cheating' is an evidential claim rather than an emotional one.