Labour Leadership: Ed's Ahead

Well, that was quick. The nominations by MPs for the Labour Party's next leader have only been open for a day and already Ed Miliband has taken a storming lead.

The nomination process is a bit complicated, but basically it works like this: there are 258 Labour MPs who can pledge their support to any one of the six candidates. They do this in the form of a signature, and every candidate has to get at least 33 signatures in order to advance to the "next stage", as it were.

Anyway, in a somewhat surprising development, Ed Miliband has already achieved that, with 35 signatures to his name. His brother David is on course to get enough, but is still trailing significantly with just 19 signatures. Ed Balls is third with four, Andy Burnham has one, and Diane Abbott and John McDonnell do not have any support so far. That should change in the next few minutes, however, as the Labour Party website is updating the signatures at 12:30pm and 5:30pm every day until the 9th June.

So in short, this could take a while: but expect both Milibands to have advanced to the next stage by the end of the day.

The Evening Stanners