Time Person of the Year 2018: Who is in the running to be December's cover star and who has won previously?

Christine Blasey Ford, Ryan Coogler and Meghan Markle among the list of potential candidates

Time magazine will name its “Person of the Year” for 2018 in December.

The winner, who will appear on the cover of next month’s issue, is the person or group of people who, for good or ill, has come to embody the passing year by popular consensus.

The magazine’s editors ultimately choose their candidate, as they have every year since 1927, but an online poll has also been carried out since 1998 to assess the strength of public feeling about particular options.

Who are 2018’s candidates for the Time cover?

This year’s shortlist includes Christine Blasey Ford, the California academic who presented powerful testimony before the US Senate alleging historic abuse at the hands of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

The 2,000 families separated at the US-Mexico border as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” illegal immigration crackdown are also nominated as a collective, as are the March for Our Lives activists.

President Trump himself is also shortlisted, as is Robert Mueller, the FBI special counsel carrying out a long-running investigation into alleged Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election.

Speaking of Moscow, Vladimir Putin is also under consideration over the suspicious poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK and the Russian navy’s recent face-off with Ukrainian ships in the Kerch Strait.

Another victim of international intrigue, the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, could make for a poignant cover star.

Others in contention include the film director Ryan Coogler for his huge box office success with Black Panther, South Korea president Moon Jae-in for his work on improving relations with Pyongyang and Meghan Markle, the American actress who married into the British Royal Family.

Who were the recent winners?

In 2017, the accolade was given to the silence breakers, those women and men who came forward in the wake of the sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and other influential celebrities to report their own experiences of abuse as part of the #MeToo movement.

Time paid tribute to the silence breakers “for giving voice to open secrets, for moving whisper networks onto social networks, for pushing us all to stop accepting the unacceptable”.

In 2016, Donald Trump, then newly crowned president-elect, was named “for reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s.”

Predictably, Mr Trump believes he should be in contention again this year.

Prior to that, the previous list of winners was as follows:

• 2015 – Angela Merkel
• 2014 – Ebola fighters
• 2013 – Pope Francis
• 2012 – Barack Obama
• 2011 – The protester (demonstrators from the Arab Spring, Occupy and Tea Party movements)
• 2010 – Mark Zuckerberg
• 2009 – Ben Bernanke
• 2008 – Barack Obama
• 2007 – Vladimir Putin
• 2006 – You (the individual online content creator)
• 2005 – The Good Samaritans (wealthy philanthropists)
• 2004 – George W Bush
• 2003 – The American soldier (fighting War on Terror)
• 2002 – The whistleblower (informants from Enron, WorldCom and the FBI)
• 2001 – Rudy Giuliani
• 2000 – George W Bush