Is Reform UK on the rise? Blackpool’s soup kitchen candidate will find out

Chris Webb is expected to win Blackpool South for Labour but eyes are on the fortunes of Mark Butcher, who works with the poor and insists he is ‘not a politician’

Mark Butcher, Reform UK’s candidate in Blackpool South’s byelection, watched as a carriage driver on the town’s promenade plunged a fist into the manure-collecting bag behind his horse. Petty bureaucracy, both men furiously agreed, was stifling the resort’s appeal.

“People came here because it was a magical place, but where have the donkey rides gone? Where are the ice-cream vendors?” asked Butcher, evoking a nostalgia for the town’s glory days and reciting a mantra that Blackpool had long been ill-served by a Labour-controlled council and – when the “red wall” crumbled in 2019 – a Conservative MP.