Burnham his misjudged massively, he believed his own "King of the North" bullpoo marketing. Bizarrely, his campaign in Makerfield is going to be unofficially that if you hate Starmer then vote Labour to get rid of him. All very weird and negative, but that's as good as it gets.
Meanwhile, Reform is actually promising to take action on immigration and many other wrongs and actually has a plan. They got 31% against 45% in 2024, that was before Starmer as PM and at least three quarters of the country utterly hating the lot of them.
Burnham will head back to Manchester to serve the remainder of his term as mayor under a cloud.
Meanwhile the anti-Starmer campaign within the Labour party has now got to a point where he will be pushed out, so they'll end up with one of the awful also-rans being plugged into the PM job. The bond markets will erupt, the Labour party will consume itself in arguments at the reality of needing to cut public spending, hopefully things will get so bad that an early general election will be the outcome, and we can get rid of this hopeless bunch of idealist idiots and get a competent government.