As you read this, possibly with a coffee in hand, I will be trudging up and down the streets of rainy Makerfield, pushing damp leaflets through letterboxes as campaigning in this historic by-election enters its final weeks.

I trained as a nurse at a hospital in nearby Warrington in the Seventies and I have a deep affection for the area. The first nightclub I ever visited was the Wigan Casino. Living at the nurses’ digs on Bewsey Road, we’d often book a coach at the weekends to take us to the legendary home of Northern soul.

All these years on, this area in the North West accounts for some of the highest sales of my novels. In fact, it was Labour’s Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, who once told me that the Wigan branch of Waterstones had devoted its entire window display to a new book from my Four Streets series.

My trip down memory lane aside, the real reason I am in Makerfield today is to challenge Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s plot to defenestrate Keir Starmer. It is his lifetime ambition to become Prime Minister and this is a desperate last-throw-of-the-dice attempt to get the keys to No10 and impose his full-on socialist agenda upon the nation.

There is a joke doing the rounds in Westminster among Labour MPs that Burnham’s sudden passion for Makerfield would be credible if he hadn’t telephoned 26 other MPs to ask them to stand aside for him first!

I first met Andy 20 years ago and he’s a likeable chap. But it’s not – and never has been – a secret that he is utterly ruthless politically and his tenure as mayor was always a means to an end, with Downing Street as the goal. And if one person is key to helping him achieve that goal, it’s Rupert Lowe, leader of the Right-wing party Restore Britain.

Polling consistently shows that only Reform or Labour can win this by-election, with one Survation survey putting Burnham on around 43 per cent of the vote, Reform’s candidate (plumber Robert Kenyon) on 40 per cent, and the Tories in last place with 2 per cent.

It’s one or the other. So why is it that Restore has fielded a candidate who, by all accounts, has the intellectual capacity of Katie Price crossed with Rebekah Vardy?

That may seem harsh, but we’ve not seen or heard from Restore’s Rebecca Shepherd, a 53-year-old businesswoman. An interview she had agreed to with The Spectator magazine recently was cancelled after Lowe made repeated excuses for why she couldn’t attend.

Despite this, she could take 7 per cent of votes on the day – including from those who may possibly confuse Reform with Restore on the ballot paper – splitting the Right-wing vote.

A vote for Restore, therefore, is in every sense of the word a vote for Burnham. It doesn’t make any sense, right?

Well, it does if you know the characters involved, the size of their egos and the shady backroom conversations happening as I write.

It is no secret that Restore’s leader, Cotswold farmer Lowe, is a typical posh boy who loves to talk in numbers. When I say numbers, I mean how many acres and how many guns he owns. It is also well known that he swims deep in the backwaters of the Conservative Party, despite having run as a candidate for the Brexit Party (Reform’s predecessor) in the 2019 General Election, dramatically withdrawing his Dudley North candidacy moments before nominations closed.

At the time, he said he feared his candidacy would split the Leave vote between the Brexit Party and the Tories – ensuring Labour candidate Melanie Dudley’s path to Westminster.

‘I saw no logic in me standing and splitting the Leave vote and letting somebody who is so politically different to me get into Westminster,’ he explained. Yet that’s exactly what he is doing now, to Reform. So what’s changed? And just how close is Rupert Lowe to the Conservative Party today?

I can reveal that Lowe stepped aside in Dudley North on November 14, 2019, a few days after he held a 4.30pm meeting with Dougie Smith, the ultra-secretive Tory adviser and the man I call the dark arts coordinator, at the DoubleTree Hilton Hotel on John Islip Street in London.

He denied he had been offered a peerage or a job from the Tories for stepping down. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

But Lowe’s links with the Tories did not stop there. He recently declared, in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, a £20,000 donation from Bolton Agnew, a businessman and the brother of Conservative life peer Lord Agnew of Oulton, who served as a minister under Michael Gove at the Cabinet Office. I am told that when Lowe is visiting his Great Yarmouth constituency – which he won in 2024 as a Reform MP before being suspended by Nigel Farage over claims he threatened party chairman Zia Yusuf – he occasionally resides with Lord Agnew on his estate in Norfolk.

Last year, too, he was placed on the prestigious Public Accounts Committee by Kemi Badenoch, a move that angered Conservative backbench MPs, many of whom would sell their own grandmother for the chance to sit on that high-profile committee.

So why are the Tories so desperate to keep Lowe on side?

I am told by a senior member of the party that they see Rupert as a useful tool in keeping Nigel Farage at bay. In fact, I believe some Tories would rather Burnham won this month’s by-election than Reform. They know a Reform win would send shockwaves through the Conservative Party and destabilise Mrs Badenoch’s leadership.

The plot thickens when you consider those shadowy figures in the background who believe that if Kemi Badenoch is removed, there is no one left to take her place, following the defection of shadow justice secretary and leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick to Reform last year.

But if there is one thing I learnt when I wrote my 2023 book The Plot, about the Machiavellian backroom dealings within the Tory party which precipitated the downfall of Boris Johnson, it is that those pulling the strings always have a card up their sleeve. Could they be keeping Lowe on the end of a line, dangling carrots because they see him as a useful idiot in an effort to try to suppress the upwards march of Reform?

As always in politics, there is more going on behind the scenes than the public is aware of, and nothing is ever as it seems.

In the meantime, I’ll keep pushing out the leaflets in the hope that the Right-wing voters of Makerfield realise they are being played for fools by Lowe and his cronies. That’s the only way to save the country from a lurch to the Left, which will make things worse than we can possibly begin to imagine.

Champions of our heritage 

Was it just me who watched teary-eyed as the Hawkstone Farmers’ Choir stormed Britain’s Got Talent with a jubilant win on Saturday night?

The Cotswolds choir, initially formed and funded by Jeremy Clarkson (and named after his beer brand) gave a winning performance of their song, This is Home. The title is surely a dig at Rachel Reeves, whose reduction of inheritance tax relief for family farms has seen many forced to sell the land they have tended for generations.

Indeed, the main message of the night was about the mental health of our farming community. As someone who lives in the area, I know how important that cause is. But it’s also about our heritage, who we are and the crucial fight to save a way of life that, with blood, sweat and tears, helps fill Britain’s bread basket. Well done Hawkstone. What a night!

So, Generation Z – the most boring generation ever – have discovered ‘zebra drinking’, a way to avoid a hangover.

Zebra drinking is, quite simply, alternating drinks. For example, a glass of wine followed by a glass of sparkling water.

I’ve been doing this for years – with a crucial difference. I add the water to the wine. (Being a typical Boomer, I can’t stand the taste of water alone.)

However, this wasn’t something I practised in my 20s. Hangovers are a rite of passage, something to be avoided only when you have experienced to the full extent how bad one can be.