The Labour Party leadership election is run upon a pure “one member, one vote” (OMOV) system. All party members and affiliated supporters will have the chance to vote on a shortlist of candidates submitted to them by the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) – the Labour MPs in the House of Commons – and the European Parliamentary Party (EPLP) – the party’s MEPS who are sitting in the European Parliament.

In order to get onto the shortlist, a candidate needs to earn the nomination of at least 10% of the combined membership of the PLP and the EPLP. This means that they need the backing of at least 22 of their peers to get their name put before the party membership. In addition to this, they also need the support of at least 5% of the Constituency Labour Parties and at least 5% of the affiliate members, including at least two trade unions.

Party members and affiliated supporters will rank the candidates in order of preference. There will then be a number of stages of voting, in which the candidate with the lowest number of first and preferential votes each time will be eliminated.

The Labour membership has been overwhelmingly pro-Corbyn – he won a leadership challenge with an emphatic 62% of the votes against challenger Owen Smith in 2016. This will make it tough for those who have been critical of the Corbyn project.

Who are the Likely Candidates?

Rebecca Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner.

The bookies’ favourite. Long-Bailey is the protégé of the shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, and the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury. She acted as Jeremy Corbyn’s understudy in the BBC’s all-party TV debates on 29th November, when she went toe to toe with Treasury Minister Rishi Sunak, who was standing in for Boris Johnson.

She also introduced the Labour manifesto launch last month, providing a warm-up act for Corbyn and McDonnell. Her media performances will have done her no harm in her bid to get the top job.

Long-Bailey hails from Old Trafford in Manchester. Her father was a docker in Salford as well as a trade union representative. She was a solicitor specialising in NHS contracts and estates before she entered parliament in 2015. Her northern background is seen as a positive, especially when it comes to appealing to lost voters in the former “red wall” that fell to the Tories in the election last week.

Her campaign received a further fillip this week when it emerged that Angela Rayner, widely tipped as a strong contender for the leadership, would run on a joint ticket with Long-Bailey. Instead of going for the top job, Rayner would stand for the post of deputy leader as Long-Bailey’s informal running mate. They are close friends as well as political allies, having shared a flat in London since becoming MPs in 2015.

Rayner is a good candidate for the post of deputy leader. She may have been denied an education, but she is sharp and very clever. Her personal life – a 16 year old single mother with no qualifications who became a social care worker and top union official – makes for inspiring stuff. She’s also seen as being on the “soft left” of the party but successfully cooperated with Corbyn, making her acceptable to a fairly wide range of groups.

Lisa Nandy

On the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, Nandy said that she was “seriously thinking” about running for the leadership. She has been the MP for Wigan since 2010, after a career as a Labour Councillor in Hammersmith Broadway from 2006-2010. She comes from political stock – her grandfather, Frank Byers, was a Liberal MP; and her father is the Marxist academic Dipak Nandy. She has also struck out on her own, creating the Centre for Towns thinktank in 2018, an independent organisation dedicated to providing research about how policies affect the UK’s towns.

Nandy is also from the Labour party’s soft-left – she endorsed Burnham in 2015, and in 2016 she resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in protest against his leadership. This may not endear her to the party membership. In her own post-mortem of the election result, in The Guardian, she wrote that Labour needs to lead on the regeneration of British towns. She said that there were policies in the Labour manifesto which were popular when “taken individually”, but that they did not work “as a package”.

Keir Starmer

Starmer is a former Director of Public Prosecutions and the shadow Brexit Secretary. He was a leading voice, along with Emily Thornberry, amongst those in the shadow cabinet who were in favour of supporting Britain remaining in the EU. He was one of the key driving forces behind shaping Labour’s approach to Brexit in the 2019 election – he supported the holding of a second Brexit referendum, a policy which eventually made its way into the party manifesto. The association with this disastrous policy, which contributed to Labour losing a great deal of support amongst working class voters in its northern heartlands, might not work in his favour.

He was first elected as an MP in 2015 and supported Andy Burnham in the 2015 leadership election, who was widely viewed as a continuity candidate with the recently-defeated Ed Miliband.  The choice suggests that his truer sympathies might be with a Miliband-style brand of social democracy. Starmer also briefly resigned from the shadow cabinet in 2016 in protest against Jeremy Corbin’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Jess Phillips

Phillips has been the MP for Birmingham Yardley since 2015. She backed Yvette Cooper in the party leadership election that year, and has been a consistent critic of the Corbyn project ever since. The most dramatic example of this was in December 2015, when Jess Phillips told Guardian columnist Owen Jones in an interview that she would “knife” Corbyn and co. “in the front” if they undermined the Labour party’s election chances.

She has a big social media presence, and many of her speeches in parliament have gone viral on Twitter. Her overt criticisms of the failings of the Corbyn leadership to tackle institutionalised antisemitism within the party will not endear her to the overwhelmingly Corbyn-supporting membership.

Phillips recently wrote a post-mortem of Labour’s woeful performance in the 2019 General Election in The Observer. She called for honest “self-criticism” so that Labour can re-connect with working class voters.

Emily Thornberry

The Shadow Foreign Secretary practised as a barrister before becoming the MP for Islington South and Finsbury in 2005. She has been an unswerving Corbyn loyalist during the election campaign, even though she backed Yvette Cooper in the 2015 leadership election and has previously deviated slightly from the Corbyn line. Thornberry has also been a staunch advocate of remaining within the European Union over the last three and a half years.

Thornberry may not be seen as the candidate to win back the working class, to put it mildly. She has been criticised for being too metropolitan and too snobbish when it comes to Leave voters in the midlands and the north. On Sophy Ridge’s Sky News programme on Sunday, former Labour MP and colleague Caroline Flint reported Thornberry as saying to her: “I’m glad my constituents aren’t as stupid as yours.” Thornberry denies the claim and is taking legal action.

Other possible candidates to look out for:

David Lammy, MP for Tottenham

Clive Lewis, MP for Norwich South

Dawn Butler, MP for Brent Central

Barry Gardiner, MP for Brent North