Bev Craig, the leader of Manchester City Council, has been confirmed as Labour's candidate to become the next mayor of Greater Manchester, with the byelection called after Andy Burnham's win in last week's Makerfield contest pulled him back to Westminster.
Craig, 41, has led the council for five years and is the first woman and first openly gay person to hold the role. Speaking to The Irish News, she described growing up on a "very traditional, working class, Protestant, loyalist" estate on the edge of north Belfast, where she came out as gay at 14. She has previously summed up the reaction at the time bluntly: people told her no one would love her, she would never marry and no one would employ her. Looking back, she says there is something powerful in having proved that wrong.
Before politics, Craig worked from her early teens in a Chinese restaurant, then in retail and a call centre, becoming the first in her family to go to university when she moved to Manchester in 2003. She has said that experience of dealing with difficult members of the public prepared her well for canvassing.
She told The Irish News that she did not grow up particularly politically engaged, pointing to a sense of tribalism and religion in Northern Ireland that put her off party politics for years. What changed her view, she said, was discovering as a young LGBTQ+ campaigner that nationalist parties, and Sinn Féin in particular, were the only ones willing to engage with her, a discovery she found genuinely disorientating given how she had been raised. It was only after relocating to England and getting involved in trade union work that she found her way into Labour politics.
Craig currently also serves as deputy mayor for economy, business and inclusive growth on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. Announcing her candidacy, she paid tribute to the region's radical history, from the Industrial Revolution to the trade union, co-operative and suffragette movements, saying Manchester had given her opportunities she could never have imagined and that she had spent her career trying to repay that.
The byelection follows Burnham's departure for Westminster, where he won Makerfield comfortably. He had previously won the 2024 Greater Manchester mayoral race with nearly two-thirds of the vote and a majority of 351,000.
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