Ed Miliband’s fate shows that how you win a leadership contest matters almost as much as winning it in the first place

Any new party leader needs legitimacy, an acceptance that they won the contest fair and square. Ed Miliband didn’t have this because he lost in two of three sections of Labour’s electoral-college and that meant he couldn’t act decisively in his first 100 days, that crucial period in which the public tend to decide whether a party leader is much cop or not. The worry for Labour is that the next leader might not be seen by some in the party as legitimate either.

There are two reasons for this. First of all there is already unease about the tactics that the frontrunners are using to try and keep challengers off the ballot paper, see this story from Patrick Wintour of the Guardian. Second, there’s concern, as Jim Pickard points out, that the Unions could swamp the contest by signing up tens of thousands of Union members as affiliated supporters.

Given the long term problems that will be caused by being seen to have strong-armed your way to victory, the front-runners would be well advised not to do anything that can be perceived as an attempt to keep other candidates off the ballot paper.