Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has emerged as the early frontrunner in the race to replace Angela Rayner as Labour’s deputy leader.
After days of speculation over who Sir Keir Starmer’s preferred candidate would be, Ms Phillipson is seen as the leadership’s choice and should easily be able to get the 80 nominations she needs from MPs.
But it comes amid a furious row over the contest with another hopeful claiming that the leadership has set up the contest to “squeeze out the left”.
Clapham and Brixton Hill MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy has warned that “people are leaving the party in droves” because the leadership is ignoring members and said she wanted to be “a voice for the members”.
But hours after she threw her hat in the ring, a poll by Survation for the Labour-focused website LabourList showed that Ms Phillipson was in pole position among Labour members.
She topped the poll with an overall favourability rating – the percentage of members who said she is a good candidate, minus those who said she is a poor candidate – of +39 per cent. Emily Thornberry, the MP for Islington South and Finsbury and the next most popular candidate, who has also announced she will stand, was on +20 per cent.
Following Ms Rayner’s departure over her failure to pay £40,000 in stamp duty on a £800,000 flat in Hove, East Sussex, it has been argued that the party needs a non-London MP and a woman to balance out Sir Keir. Ms Phillipson fits the bill, representing Houghton and Sunderland South.
The contest comes as many within Labour are seeking reassurance about government policy following a reshuffle that some have described as “a right-wing coup”.
In a statement announcing her candidacy, Ms Phillipson said: “Today I am putting myself forward as a candidate for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, to unite our great party and deliver for working people.”
Leaning on her working-class credentials, she went on: “I am a proud working-class woman from the North East. I have come from a single-parent family on a tough council street, all the way to the cabinet, determined to deliver better life chances for young people growing up in our country.”
Ms Phillipson has been the face of one of the government’s more left-wing policies, pushing through the decision to add VAT onto private school fees to pay for 6,000 more teachers in state schools.
She said: “I’ve taken on powerful vested interests in the education sector – and even as they threw everything at me, I have never taken a backwards step. I will bring that same determination to every battle ahead of us. Because make no mistake: we are in a fight. We all know the dangers Reform poses to our country.”
She added: “But not only am I ready for it, I’ve proven we can do it. I’ve shown we can beat Farage in the North East, while staying true to the Labour Party’s values of equality, fairness and social justice.
“With me as deputy leader, we will beat them right across the country and unite to deliver the opportunity that working people across this great country deserve.”
Ms Phillipson already appears to have the backing of health secretary Wes Streeting, who stated his preference for “a northern woman”.
He told Times Radio: “I think, without being disrespectful to some brilliant women in London who are standing, like Emily Thornberry, [whom] I’ve got a lot of respect for, I can well understand why lots of my colleagues are saying we should have a deputy leader from outside London to broaden perspectives, broaden the base.”
Former shadow cabinet minister Ms Thornberry, who was left out of Sir Keir’s cabinet in government, said she would speak out and “not just nod along” with the party leadership, adding that it had “made mistakes and must listen”.
She listed Gaza and welfare among her top issues, two areas that are expected to be popular among Labour voters, as well as a wealth tax and changes to special educational needs (SEND) provision, which are expected to include cuts.
Meanwhile, Lucy Powell, who was sacked by Starmer as leader of the Commons last week, has also announced that she will stand. She said she would bring together “all parts of the party” and champion backbench MPs, whose votes she will need to get on the ballot paper.
She said the party must use “all our talents and experience” to be successful, and that this means “responding to the huge challenges we face with bold policies, rooted in progressive Labour values”.
Alison McGovern, currently at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, also announced her candidacy, promising to be a fresh voice for Labour values and to take on right-wing populism.
Other early contenders also seeking the 80 MP nominations by 11 September are Ms Ribeiro-Addy and Liverpool MP Paula Barker, both from the left of the party.
Ms Ribeiro-Addy told The Independent that she has a different vision for the deputy leader role from one who gets to sit around the cabinet table.
She said: “We have to accept that the Labour Party members are important. We can't just discount them. It is the activists that win the elections, and at the moment, we are losing them in droves.”
Referencing policy on Gaza and recent attempts to slash welfare, she said: “We need to be more aware of what members think, of where they think things are going wrong, and more open to listening to their ideas. That's how it's always been, and that's how it's always worked. When we don't listen to our party members, we tend to fail, and we can see that happening at the moment.”
But she warned that the contest was set up to keep candidates from the left like her out with the threshold of 80 MPs being reminiscent of the 100 needed for the Tory leadership election in 2023 which ensured Rishi Sunak went unchallenged.
“We need to be able to tolerate a broad range of views and squeezing out the left doesn't help. We're losing our activists. We're hemorrhaging votes to the Greens.
“I know that our focus at the moment is Reform, and I'm not saying we should take our eye off that, but we also are in a first past the post electoral system. If we lose votes to the left, we will lose to the right.”
Others have ruled themselves out, including former transport secretary Louise Haigh, who had been considered a popular alternative from outside the leadership.
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