Hello... remember us?I

So much has been made about the differences here, or Westminster But, in the end, we all want so many of the same things-housing, decent income, affordable lives...

- ROS WYNNE-JONES

AS dawn breaks outside the Denton Delights Chinese takeaway, not everybody is happy. One person after another hurries past, head down. "You don't want to hear what I think," an elderly man says angrily.

Another says simply: "Disgusted." A man in a dark van winds down his window and shoves his phone out. "I am very, very angry is what I am," he says. "Look at this." His phone is playing an Instagram video that features Hannah Spencer, the newly minted Green MP for the area. The text is in Urdu.

"What are they saying on there?" he says. "We just don't know, do we? Speak English. That's what I'm angry about." As he drives off, he shouts out of the window: "I want my country back!" It's the morning after the Gorton and Denton by-election, and after weeks when Reform voters dominated the town square with their opinions, they are suddenly in short supply.

In their place come Green voters grinning from ear to ear, who finally feel able to say they voted for Hannah the plumber in a town that has voted Labour since the Second World War.

Outside Morrisons, Emily Woolley, 34, says she didn't tell anyone she was voting Green "because you know what it's like with politics and family". But she adds: "I wish I had spoken about it now. Maybe there are lots of us?" Hurrying to work, 42-year-old accountant Clare Macfarlane says she and teenage daughter, Freya, are "absolutely delighted" with the Green victory.

Dorian Crowley, 78, a retired nurse, says she stuck with Labour because they hadn't had enough time yet to deal with the "terrible mess the Tories left us all in". She adds: "We need to give them more time." But Reform candidate Matt Goodwin's graceless loss which he blamed on "Islamists and woke progressives" and "a dangerous Muslim sectarianism" - has set a tone echoed by some of his party's followers.