Meet the three men and three women competing to succeed Nigel Farage as leader of the rightwing Eurosceptic party

Following Nigel Farage’s resignation as leader of Ukip, a party that has until now revolved largely around one man must find a new figurehead. Here are the runners and riders for that post.

Jonathan Arnott

Ukip’s former general secretary is a board games enthusiast: he has a forthcoming book about chess and was in the England under-21 squad.

Arnott joined Ukip in 2001 aged 20 and ran for his first election – for Sheffield city council – the following year, according to his Facebook page. He has also run for police and crime commissioner, and became an MEP in May 2014, a role he combines with working part-time as a maths teacher.

Arnott’s pitch for leadership acknowledges bluntly: “You can’t out-Nigel Nigel.” Instead, he is pitching himself as a candidate for the disaffected north, saying he intends to appeal to those who voted leave in the EU referendum, but did not vote Ukip.

Phillip Broughton

A semi-professional wrestler and supervisor in Tesco, Broughton rose in Ukip circles during the 2015 general election, when he fought for the north-east seat of Hartlepool, one of the party’s key target seats. He didn’t win, but he did achieve what he describes as the party’s fourth-best result.

Broughton, 31, started his political career as a Conservative councillor in Stockton but defected to Ukip in 2011. He says he wants to broaden the party’s appeal to take on Labour and the Tories.

His wrestling past caused him some trouble when a video connected to his company was unearthed by Guido Fawkes during the European elections. The bizarre skit features Broughton, in wrestling-promoter braggadoccio mode, telling the camera: “I’m cleverer than you, I’m better looking than you, I’ve got more charisma than all of you could ever dream of, and of course the important thing, I’ve got more money than any of you could possibly imagine.”

Broughton told the Hartlepool Mail that he had been quoted “out of context”.

Lisa Duffy

Lisa Duffy, a Cambridgeshire councillor, hit the headlines on Wednesday, calling for a “total ban on Muslim schools” as part of her “commonsense policy platform” outlined in an interview with the Daily Express. She added: “That doesn’t mean I am picking on British Islam, but if you think about what our security services are looking at – 2,000 individuals that have come from those faith schools – when does indoctrination start?”

Few outside the party are likely to have heard of Duffy before her bid for leadership was backed by Suzanne Evans, the party’s former deputy chairman. Evans, who is suspended from the party and cannot run herself, said Duffy represented a “commonsense future for our party”.

The endorsement prompted the Ukip donor Arron Banks to scoff on Twitter, “That’s like Basingstoke town taking on Real Madrid.” But although Duffy, a mother of six, may not have had the public profile, she was already known inside the party: she was chief of staff to the MEP Patrick O’Flynn, and is married to party organiser Peter Reeve.

Bill Etheridge

The West Midlands MEP joined Ukip in 2011 after being thrown out of the Tories for posing with golliwog dolls in a Facebook post that he said was trying to stimulate “healthy debate” about whether the dolls are racist. He hit back by writing a book celebrating golliwogs, titled Britain: A Post-Political Correctness Society.

This wasn’t to be his last brush with controversy: shortly after he became an MEP in 2014, the party was forced to defend Etheridge after he described Adolf Hitler during a speech to youth activists as a “magnetic and forceful performer” who “achieved a great deal”.

Etheridge has outlined a succession of eye-catching policies since announcing his candidacy, including a referendum on bringing back the death penalty, slashing beer duties to save British pubs and charging prisoners £40,000 a year. He has also proposed banning burqas in public, saying: “I don’t mind what people do for their cultural values or for their religious values. That’s one of the great freedoms of our country.

“We are in a severe security situation, and if you are in a public place that is security-sensitive, I’m afraid you have got to show your face.”

Diane James

The deputy party chair is considered the most likely winner, after former frontrunner Steven Woolfe’s candidacy ran aground. As Ukip’s spokeswoman on home affairs and justice, James is one of the better-known faces of the party (aside from Nigel Farage, of course).

James, who is an MEP for south-east England, was responsible for one of Ukip’s great near-misses, coming within 2,000 votes of unseating the Lib Dems at the Eastleigh by-election in 2013 in a result that shocked political observers. However, she withdrew as a candidate for the safe Tory seat of North West Hampshire at the 2015 general election citing personal reasons.

Diane James is new favourite to lead Ukip as candidate list is finalised Read more

James is fluent in French and German and worked as a business analyst in the healthcare industry before entering politics.

Last year she praised Vladimir Putin for his “nationalism”, saying: “I admire him from the point of view that he’s standing up for his country. He’s very nationalist. I do admire him. He is a very strong leader.” During the Eastleigh byelection, she was forced to apologise after commenting on “crime associated with Romanians”.

Elizabeth Jones

The deputy chair of the Lambeth Ukip branch, Jones is one of the more colourful candidates in this year’s contest, telling a Ukip website her favourite newspaper is the Times of India, and citing Boudicca and Margaret Thatcher as reasons Ukip voters should back her campaign to be the party’s mayoral candidate.

In 2014, Jones made headlines for losing her temper during a radio debate, screaming at her Socialist party opponent to “just shut up”. She later explained to Breitbart that she was “constantly interrupted by a member of an obscure leftist group and I decided to put the interest of the listeners first”.

Jones, a family lawyer, has cut her teeth campaigning on local issues such as parking in London, one of the UK’s least receptive regions for Ukip.