BREAKING: Jeremy Corbyn WILL be on the ballot for the Labour leadership contest

REUTERS/Toby Melville

Britain's leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, gestures as he delivers his keynote speech at the party's annual conference in Brighton, Britain September 29, 2015.

Jeremy Corbyn WILL be on the ballot for the upcoming Labour leadership contest, the party's chief administrative body announced on Tuesday evening.

The National Executive Committee (NEC) voted in favour of Corbyn going straight onto the ballot, meaning he will not be required to secure nominations from 51 MPs and MEPs in order to fight for his leadership.

This crucial decision comes after weeks of debate about whether the under-pressure leader would have to secure a certain number of nominations before he could stand in the contest.

Here is the NEC's statement, per The Guardian:

The NEC has agreed that as the incumbent leader Jeremy Corbyn will go forward onto the ballot without requiring nominations from the Parliamentary Labour Party and the European Parliamentary Labour Party.

All other leadership candidates will require nominations from 20% of the PLP and EPLP.

The vote was 18-14, according to Michael Crick of the BBC.

This is really bad news for his opponents. Corbyn was forced into the leadership challenge after a majority of Labour MPs passed a "no confidence" vote in his leadership. The disputed rule was whether Corbyn needed to show nominations from 20% of his parliamentary colleagues to get on the ballot and stand again as leader. It was very unlikely that Corbyn would have been able to persuade at least 51 parliamentarians to support him.

However, he remains overwhelmingly popular with Labour members who will vote in the actual contest, making him favourite to win for the second time. If he wins, the battle lines inside Labour will be starkly drawn: Corbyn, supported by the majority of members; and Labour's MPs, a majority of whom do not support him. It brings Labour one step closer to a formal split, with one wing or the other leaving the party.

Former shadow Business Secretary Angela Eagle officially launched her bid to replace Corbyn on Monday after the latter lost a vote of confidence last month.

The NEC is made up of 33 representatives of the parliamentary party, trade unions, MEPs, constituency groups, and others. The secret vote was extremely close and came down to a "knife edge," according to The Times' Lucy Fisher.

Corbyn initially refused to leave the meeting room when he asked to by the Committee, according to a tweet by the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg.