Why is Emily Thornberry set to drop out of the Labour leadership race?

The shadow foreign secretary has failed to translate her prominence in the party into support, writes John Rentoul

Thornberry at hustings in Bristol earlier this month (Getty)

The deadline for nominations to be Labour leader is tomorrow, and it looks as if Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, will fail to gain sufficient support to put her name on the ballot paper that goes to party members.

She needs to secure nominations either from three affiliated organisations or from 33 constituency Labour parties (CLPs). She has no prospect of picking up a nomination from any affiliate, so for some time her only chance of staying in the contest has been by winning nominations from local parties.

As of last night, she had 26 nominations, still seven short of the target – as tallied by a Twitter account called CLP Nominations. Many local parties will be meeting to vote on their nominations tonight, but at the current rate Thornberry is not going to make it.

Thus party members will be asked to choose between Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy. Paradoxically, all three qualified by securing nominations from affiliates and did not need nominations from local parties, but they all qualified by the second route as well.

Why has Thornberry struggled to gain the nominations she needs? The simple reason is that she has neither a power base in the trade unions nor a large enough body of support among party members.

Each of the other candidates has the support of at least one big trade union, so Thornberry was always dependent on the support of grassroots members in local parties. But according to the YouGov survey of party members in mid-January, she was the first preference for leader of only 3 per cent of them. Even accounting for pockets of higher support, or local parties nominating her to “widen the debate”, such a low base was never likely to yield sufficient nominations.

But why is her support so low? After all, in an earlier poll in July last year, 59 per cent of Labour members said she would make a very good or fairly good leader, a higher score than anyone except Keir Starmer (68 per cent) and John McDonnell (64 per cent).

Unfortunately for her, her support overlaps with Starmer’s. She is a Remainer who stayed in the shadow cabinet and who was generally supportive of Jeremy Corbyn. When it came to the choice, most members who wanted a pro-EU loyalist preferred Starmer. He was more prominent in the day-to-day fight against Brexit, and she incurred the disapproval of Corbyn’s inner circle by blaming the party’s poor showing in the European parliament election on its failure to back a second referendum.

As a result, she was demoted from her role deputising for Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions – which was given to Long-Bailey instead. Thus Long-Bailey has a solid base of support among Corbyn’s core supporters, while Nandy, who ran Owen Smith’s leadership campaign and who resigned from the shadow cabinet in protest against Corbyn’s leadership, cleaned up among the Corbyn-sceptics.

So it looks as though the final stage of the contest will be a three-way fight, with the result announced on 4 April.