Your Party has ruled out a co-leadership model under draft guidance released this evening. Members will select the exact model of leadership at the party’s inaugural conference this weekend, but the New Statesman understands co-leadership will not be one of the options.
Instead, members will be asked to choose between a single leadership model, or a “collective” leadership model. Under both options, party members will elect a Central Executive Committee (CEC) in the first months of this year which will include a party chair and deputy chair as well as other officers (none of whom can be Members of Parliament).
If members choose Your Party to be led by a single leader this weekend, then the party will hold a leadership election in January next year. If members choose the “collective” model, then the party’s CEC will become the public-facing leaders of Your Party, meaning no MPs will be involved in the party’s leadership.
A Your Party source told the New Statesman that the decision to rule-out the co-leadership model was made as “we want to end the psychodrama, not institutionalise it.” Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South who has been co-founding the party alongside Jeremy Corbyn, has long made clear that co-leadership is her preference. Corbyn is less convinced, although he has maintained that whatever structure the party opts for should be chosen by members. The source added that the decision to rule out the co-leadership model from the draft guidance “shows you can’t force someone to be co-leader with you who doesn’t want to be.”
After the conference this weekend, the party’s establishment will be steered by a group which includes all three Independent Alliance MPs – Corbyn, Ayoub Khan and Shockat Adam – and a group of party members chosen through sortition (a process which allows you to select a random yet representative selection of the population). Zarah Sultana voluntarily left the Independent Alliance on 18 September, and is not expected to be part of this group.
With only four days to go before Corbyn opens the party’s founding conference with a speech on Saturday morning, the details of how exactly this nascent left-wing movement will work are emerging. But one thing is now clear – it will not be co-led.
[Further reading: Jeremy Corbyn: my apology to Your Party members]
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