Farage and Goodwin have now wailed to their supporters that losing is “cheating”, as the Greens take Gorton And Denton Right, so that was a good night to be a Green Party supporter wasn’t it? the result in Gorton and Denton by-election has been declared and the numbers are the whole story before anyone gets to start crying about “integrity” and who has it and who doesn’t. Hannah Spencer for the Greens got 14,980 votes, Matt Goodwin for Reform got 10,578, Angeliki Stogia for Labour got 9,364, and the Greens are more than 4,400 ahead of second place, so it wasn’t even close in the end, all while Labour isn’t even the runner-up, it’s third, its nightmare scenario position. Nigel Farage has immediately taken an early lead in something else though and that would be the sore loser stakes, as while others in his party are playing the result down, that they never thought they would actually win, as if Matt Goodwin would ever be the candidate if that were true, Farage called it “a victory for sectarian voting and cheating”, and he has done that after losing by a margin that does not need excuses to explain it away and done so in such a way as to make obvious what he means – he’s blaming Muslims and a weird family voting story that is going round, which I’ll deal with in a moment. But Nigel Farage has chosen to respond like this because he has just watched the one thing that matters to him fail, which is his ability to make Reform look inevitable in a seat where he thought the demography and the mood might be enough. He has got a strong second place, he has pushed Labour into third, he has done the thing he always does which is turn politics into a grievance machine, and he has still lost, so he has reached for the same move that always follows a loss that hurts, which is to put suspicion onto the voters rather than responsibility onto himself. That is why “cheating” is the word he’s reached for, because it is not about fixing a procedure, it is about staining a result, and it is the first step in making people argue about legitimacy instead of arguing about why a party got rejected by thousands of people.