“He’s like a 2D person dropped into a 3D world.” This is how Green party byelection candidate Hannah Spencer, a plumber and Trafford councillor, described her Reform UK rival, the slick rightwing academic-turned-GB News host Matt Goodwin, to me this week.

“It’s almost like [Goodwin] doesn’t quite know how to interact,” Spencer, who has lived in Greater Manchester all her life, said. “I find it quite strange that there are people who’ll give him the time of day on the door, because he’s like the epitome of an unpleasant politician… a suit.”

But who is Hannah Spencer? According to the rightwing internet, the 34-year-old local plumber is actually a fancy heat pump-fitter who’s cosplaying as working-class while being married to an AstraZeneca millionaire and living in a gated mansion with a weird chimney.

Actually, Spencer left school at 16, she’s a plumber who fits heat pumps as part of the job and is also training to be a plasterer. She described herself as a hands-on person who “really struggled” with academic subjects, and dismissed the misinformation online as “sexism” from a “vocal minority that couldn’t get their head around a woman doing what they’d say was a man’s job”. Spencer doesn’t live in a mansion of any kind, and she’s single. The AstraZeneca principal scientist listed as her partner in 2023 is an ex. To clarify, you can be a working-class, community-minded tradesperson and still have nice hair.

Spencer has an affable and energetic persona online, but how would she come across in person? Over the hour or so we spent together inhaling proper chips from Sue’s Chippy, she was warm and human. She tells me about bad school reports – “they thought I wouldn’t amount to anything” and how the local flytipping issue is a class problem – “they don’t even let you in the tip without a car!” As a fellow animal lover, it’s easy to find common ground – she has four rescue greyhounds.

The race in Gorton and Denton is widely seen as a temperature-test of the entire country, where Reform is still regularly polling 10% ahead, and a referendum on Keir Starmer’s premiership. No pressure, then – and Spencer doesn’t seem to be feeling it.

The newish constituency came up for grabs when Labour’s Andrew Gwynne stepped down citing health concerns last month, after a scandal over offensive WhatsApp messages. Although Labour won the seat in 2024 with over 50% of the vote, times have changed.

The Greens are keen to frame the competition as a two-horse race between themselves and Reform, and while the bookies are backing the Greens as their favourite to win but pollsters Electoral Calculus predicting a Reform gain, Labour’s grip on this deep-red seat can’t be written off quite yet.

Before the 2024 boundary change, Labour had held Gorton – solidly working-class with splashes of gentrification – for decades. The new constituency of Gorton and Denton, however, isn’t a place as such – it’s a hodge-podge construction in the shape of angel wings that staples together the Manchester areas of Burnage, Gorton, Levenshulme and Longsight with three wards that make up Denton in Tameside.

The Manchester wards are more diverse in terms of faith and ethnicity, with significant Muslim populations and higher numbers of university graduates and students, while the Tameside wards are overwhelmingly white. Gorton is one of Manchester’s most deprived areas, with health outcomes for residents “among the most challenging in the city”, while the picture is more mixed in Denton which has some comparatively wealthy neighbourhoods.

Spencer isn’t convinced that someone like Goodwin – who has stood by his claim that non-white people born in the UK aren’t necessarily British – can properly represent a constituency where nearly half of the population (44%) identifies as coming from a minority ethnic background and more than a quarter of voters are Muslim.

“It’s not just that he doesn’t give a shit,” Spencer told me, “he’s actually intent on creating a lot of division.” Goodwin’s call for couples without children to be taxed more has gone down particularly poorly with Spencer – “horrific” she says.

Goodwin’s campaign promises to “stop the boats and end local hotels and houses being stuffed full of illegal immigrants” and “put British people first… end handouts to foreign nationals”. This message appears to be resonating in Denton particularly, where the Greens face an uphill battle. By contrast, the south Manchester area of Levenshulme where I lived for years in my 20s is awash with green placards and garden stakes.

In Denton, I watched a group of Green canvassers go door-to-door among neat, well-kept detached houses, and noted that the residents who did open their doors said they were either not voting or planning to choose Reform. People seemed fed up and reluctant to engage in most cases, and although I saw a few Reform posters, there were no turquoise canvassers.

On the door, the Greens’ policy to legalise drugs came under fire, but the issue on Denton residents’ lips was immigration. When I asked Spencer about this, her take came in two parts. She began with a recognisably Polanksiesque line – “I know immigration is good for our country, I will scream that from the rooftop” – before calling the immigration system “really unfair”.

Spencer explained that not everywhere in the UK has been affected in the same way and that people feel an unequal system has been “forced on” them.

“The north has taken a higher number of people who have refugee status than places in the south,” she continued, adding that supporting newcomers has largely fallen to community groups, charities and places of worship, while “companies like Serco make millions, billions out of it”.

“It’s unfair on taxpayers, but it’s also unfair on the human beings who are in it, who have been treated badly,” Spencer said. “And I think when you have that conversation with people, that’s the common ground – people share that view.”

On the legalisation of drugs, Spencer added that “if [Goodwin] can’t see that the system we’ve got with drugs in this country is broken and he’s not coming up with an alternative, then why would anyone think that he’d be a good MP for them in parliament?”

Gorton and Denton’s byelection is increasingly being viewed as a litmus test on where Britain is at: are we ready to welcome Nigel Farage and his new so-called shadow cabinet

into Downing Street on a hard-right anti-immigration platform, or does a populist left message that points the finger at billionaires rather than asylum seekers resonate more with who we are as a country?

According to Spencer, it’s important to “unpick the things we’re angry about – kids not getting access to a good school, not getting a GP appointment – that’s not immigration, that’s underfunding of services”.

The government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, coupled with Starmer’s painful unpopularity and the fallout from the Epstein files ripping through Westminster, could deeply damage the chances of Labour’s candidate – long-standing Whalley Range councillor Angeliki Stogia. Labour may end up wishing they had allowed popular mayor Andy Burnham to stand instead.

Spencer told me that Gaza comes up on the door a lot – not just because some residents have family in Palestine but because there’s “this shared thing about injustice”. “A city like this has been built on working class communities struggling together,” she said. “We have very high levels of empathy, and we’ve seen a Labour government still refuse to call it a genocide.”

The topic of Palestine is an easy win for the Greens over Labour, and Spencer slammed Keir Starmer’s infamous comment that Israel has “the right” to cut off water to Gaza’s population in our interview, calling it “a complete lack of humanity” and “absolutely abhorrent”.

“You can’t even do that here – if I don’t pay my water bill, you can’t turn my water off, because it’s such a fundamental human right.”

Campaign insiders told me that if turnout in Denton is high, the Greens could be in trouble, but as it stands, they think they’ve done enough in Levenshulme, Longsight and Burnage to see off Labour and Reform. Expending efforts in the more Reform-leaning Denton suggests the Greens believe there’s now breathing room from shoring up their base to winning over some voters in an area where their brand is a tougher sell.

Spencer said residents she meets while campaigning aren’t used to being told the truth, but she’s honest about what individual MPs can actually achieve. “I couldn’t be a good tradesperson if I was constantly lying to people – no one would book me again,” she laughed. “We don’t get away with that in any other area of life, so why is it okay in politics?”

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