The Independent Group of 11 MPs plans to meet on Monday to discuss its future. One of the questions they are bound to discuss is: who is going to be their leader? Our chief political commentator assesses the candidates.

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1. Chuka Umunna

The early favourite. Heidi Allen, one of the Conservative defectors, said she thought it was “obvious” it should be him. This caused some irritation among other members of the group who thought this was taking the idea of being liberated to say what they think too far.

Umunna is an articulate communicator who was already the most visible face of the campaign for a second referendum and – we have an interest to declare – a columnist for The Independent.

His negatives are a string of positions taken in the past from which he has now moved on, such as voting to invoke Article 50 and arguing to leave the EU single market, and a reputation for indecision dating from the time when he pulled out of standing for the Labour leadership after a few days in 2015.

He has the advantage of plainly wanting the post – “I want to play the biggest role that I possibly can,” he told The Times yesterday – but his strongest claim may be that he has been the organising force of the week’s defections, which, with the exception of Joan Ryan and Ian Austin, were coordinated by Umunna’s staff through his House of Commons office.

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2. Luciana Berger

The star of the launch of the new group on Monday, she came into the room first and spoke first, with real sincerity and clarity. Even her opening mistake, introducing herself as “the Labour MP for…” before correcting to just “the MP for Liverpool Wavertree”, was a testament to the personal struggle each of the defectors has been through to give up longstanding party identity.

It would send a powerful message to the Labour Party, which has yet to have a permanent female leader, for her to lead the Independent Group, the first parliamentary group to have a majority of female members (seven women and four men).

But there are practical problems in that she is eight months pregnant; if she were chosen as leader the group would need a deputy to stand in for a while.

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3. Anna Soubry

The most experienced of the group, having served as a minister, attending cabinet if never a full cabinet minister. Huge confidence and a forceful speaker. Tendency to speak her mind to the extent of saying, unhelpfully for the rest of the group, that she supported George Osborne’s fiscally responsible policies as chancellor in the coalition government.

It would also be curious positioning for the group to have a former Conservative as leader, when the richer recruiting grounds are on the Labour benches in the House of Commons.

That said, the Conservative defectors are valuable to the group’s identity with the voters outside parliament, giving it a cross-party appeal and cutting against what would otherwise be the group’s image as simply a reversion to the pre-Corbyn Labour Party.

Soubry would therefore be a strong contender as deputy leader.

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4. Heidi Allen

If she hadn’t already endorsed Umunna as leader, Allen could have been a contender herself. She was the star of the Tory defectors’ event on Wednesday, in that she was the least known of the three and yet came across well.

None of the three seems to be a traditional Conservative, but Allen has often sounded like a Labour MP in the House of Commons. Last week, for example, she asked Theresa May to end the benefits freeze at Prime Minister’s Questions, and at the launch of the three defectors she said the government had “deepened” the suffering of people on benefits, “while having the power to fix it”.

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5. Chris Leslie

The strength of the Independent Group is that it has several members who could easily lead a political party. Leslie is another experienced politician, having been the youngest postwar minister at the cabinet office at the age of 29 in 2001, and even serving briefly as shadow chancellor for four months after Ed Balls lost his seat in 2015.

His waspish sense of humour was on display on BBC Question Time this week. Andy McDonald, the sacrifice offered by the Labour Party, said it was dealing with the problem of antisemitism and mentioned the report by Shami Chakrabarti. “Baroness Chakrabarti?” asked Leslie, adding that he thought there was a problem with an “independent” inquiry carried out by someone immediately elevated to the shadow cabinet via the House of Lords.