Why the Gorton & Denton by-election may be dirtiest campaign yet

But even seasoned political campaigners say there is a marked intensity to what has emerged as a three-way contest between Reform UK, Labour and the Greens in this diverse southeast Manchester seat.

For all the usual hype that accompanies by-elections, this is like no other. For the first time, it seems, the battle is focused not between the established parties but between two insurgents, the Greens on the left and Reform on the right.

For Spencer, 34, who now needs security when attending official events, the friction is more than the standard rough and tumble of politics. It is a sign of something more worrying. She has been accused online of lying about her job, about where she lives and even about details of her love life.

She recalled a recent heated encounter on the street with a passerby who appeared to have been influenced by these online claims. “He was really angry and he was shouting, ‘You’re not a plumber!’,” she said. “It was sad. Me and him actually probably have quite a lot in common, but he sees me as something fake.”

• Tommy Robinson backs Reform candidate in Gorton & Denton by-election

Another rumour, concerning her former partner, a scientist at AstraZeneca, soon snowballed into claims he was the company’s multimillionaire chief executive and that they lived in a mansion in nearby Hale.

Spencer laughed at the absurdity, but added: “It’s difficult, because democracy should be about challenging each other and holding people to account. But the misinformation out there seems to really be affecting people’s decisions.”

Although Spencer suspects much of the vitriol originates from opposition activists and online bots, her party has not escaped criticism for its own relationship with the truth.

The Greens have been accused of twisting the words of the politics professor Rob Ford on their leaflets to suggest “Labour are done” in the seat. Ford wrote in a blog post that the Greens’ route to victory looked “more straightforward”, but the comparison was drawn against George Galloway’s Workers Party, not Labour. He described bar charts in which the Greens put themselves in a clear second place to Reform as a “crime against data analysis”.

Angeliki Stogia, Labour’s candidate, accused Reform of deploying what she called the “dirtiest” and “oldest trick in the book”: presenting the contest as a straight fight between them and the Greens. Such framing, Labour said, threatened to split the progressive vote and let Nigel Farage’s party in through the middle. The party remains scarred by its experience in last year’s Runcorn & Helsby by-election, where it lost to Reform by a mere six votes.

Farage’s party is bullish about their chances of electing their ninth MP while riding high in the national polls. Yet the race, Ford said, is a “pollster’s nightmare” because each of the three parties could win and “each can tell a plausible story now about how they might do it”.

The increasingly bitter tone of the campaign has not been confined to arguments over bar charts. Labour and Reform have faced police scrutiny over their conduct.

Early in the campaign, Reform was referred to Greater Manchester police over a leaflet disguised as a handwritten letter from a local pensioner which they failed to label as promotional content. The force confirmed it had provided “advice and guidance”.

The party’s candidate, Matt Goodwin, has also come under pressure to distance himself from members of his campaign team after an investigation by The Manchester Mill, a local newspaper, that revealed racist and antisemitic content they had shared online. Goodwin’s interim campaign manager in Tameside, Adam Mitula, said he would “never touch a Jewish woman”.

Goodwin, a former academic and GB News presenter, declined a request for an interview.

Police are also investigating claims that Labour tried to “bribe” voters with food after a video emerged from a campaign event where people were allegedly told they would be fed if they held up posters. A Labour spokesman dismissed the move as “desperate and politically motivated”.

Amid the incessant Facebook posts, ringing of doorbells and blizzard of leaflets, local voters are weary. Shirley O’Sullivan, 59, a teaching assistant, said it was “very hard to know who to believe”. Her husband, John, agreed, describing the shenanigans between parties as “all very childish”. Their decision, they say, will come down to “an educated guess”.

For all the noise, the result may hinge on something more prosaic: turnout. Andy Westwood, professor of public policy at the University of Manchester, said by-elections typically attracted low participation and suggested the region had a history of voter apathy. The 2012 Manchester Central by-election won by Lucy Powell, now Labour’s deputy leader, still holds the record for the lowest turnout in a postwar parliamentary by-election at 18.2 per cent.

“It’s February, it’s dark, cold and it’s wet, so all the parties will be fighting hard not just to persuade voters, but to get their own supporters out,” Westwood said. In those circumstances, Labour’s historic foothold in the seat could prove decisive. “Labour have got a bigger ground machine because they’ve got a bigger historical vote.”

But if he had to call it? “My instinct says it’s probably between Green and Reform,” he said.