Metro Mayor Dan Norris puts himself forward to be Labour MP candidate

09/01/2024

The West of England metro mayor [1] Dan Norris has put himself forward to be Labour [2] ‘s candidate to take on Jacob Rees Mogg at the next General Election – and could well also be chosen to be the party’s candidate in the imminent Kingswood [3] by-election. Mr Norris told Bristol Live [4] that he wouldn’t necessarily step down as the regional metro mayor, pointing to other mayors across the country – including Boris Johnson – who have been elected MPs at the same time. Labour members are currently in the process of choosing the party’s candidate for the new North East Somerset and Hanham seat – an area for which Mr Norris was the Labour MP from 1997 to 2010, but the announcement from Mr Norris throws up the possibility that Labour could also select him to be its candidate at the Kingswood by-election too.

The Kingswood constituency is being broken up and will no longer exist at the next election, and just under half of the area that is currently Kingswood – from Hanham and Bitton to Cadbury Heath – will be transferred into Jacob Rees Mogg’s North East Somerset seat. The resignation of Kingswood’s Conservative MP Chris Skidmore this week triggered a by-election, which is to take place in the Kingswood constituency within weeks, even though a General Election could be called this year, and even though the Kingswood constituency itself will no longer exist at that point. Mr Norris told Bristol Live he wanted to ‘do whatever I can’ to help Labour win the General Election. “This is going to be a very important General Election coming up, and we don’t know when it will be, but I would like to be considered as a potential candidate for North East Somerset and Hanham,” he said.

“I will do what I can to help the Labour Party [7] win that election, and if the members in the new constituency decide that they want me as their candidate, I would be delighted. Ultimately, it’s all down to the voters, and I am take nothing for granted and I’m always hugely honoured to be able to serve as an elected representative,” he added. While local Labour Party members in the new North East Somerset and Hanham constituency will be deciding in the coming weeks who their General Election candidate will be, the Labour Party in London is set to decide who the party’s candidate should be in the more imminent Kingswood by-election.

Mr Norris said he would be open to be the party’s candidate in Kingswood too, if chosen. “That’s a decision for the Labour Party, but I will always do what I can to help the party get elected,” he said.

Dan Norris at the launch event of TBY2, the new facility at the Bottle Yard in Hengrove, South Bristol (Image: Bottle Yard)

Mr Norris has a long history in politics in the area. He was an city councillor in South Bristol and an Avon County Councillor in the 1980s and 90s and first stood for parliament as far back as 1987, in a constituency then called Northavon. In 1992, he was Labour’s candidate in Wansdyke – a constituency which closely matches the area the new North East Somerset & Hanham seat covers.

He lost first time to Jack Aspinwall, but in 1997 he won in the Blair landslide, and was Labour MP for Wansdyke through the 2000s. Boundary changes created the North East Somerset seat, centred around Keynsham and Midsomer Norton, and in 2010, he lost to Jacob Rees Mogg, who has been the MP there ever since. Mr Norris returned to frontline politics in 2021, when he was selected to be Labour’s candidate in the West of England Combined Authority metro mayor election.

He won, and has been a more high-profile, and controversial metro mayor in the nearly three years since. The West of England combined authority covers the whole of Bristol, South Gloucestershire [8] and Bath [9] and North East Somerset. The next metro mayor election is not until May 2025, and Mr Norris said, if selected and then elected as an MP – either in Kingswood next month or at the General Election at some point in the next year – he believes he could do both roles.

“Elsewhere in the country, other people have shown it is possible to do both,” Mr Norris said, pointing to two examples. Dan Jarvis has been an MP in Barnsley since 2011 and also was the metro mayor for South Yorkshire for four years from 2018 to 2022, and Boris Johnson was the Mayor of London until May 2016, a year after he was also elected as Uxbridge MP in 2015. “It’s possible to be both, and clearly we have the convention that MPs can also be ministers – which I have been – and this is something similar – so there is plenty of precedent for someone to be both an MP and a metro mayor, whether for a shorter or longer period.

“But it’ll be for my colleagues in the Labour Party and ultimately, the people of this area, to decide if they want that,” he added.

References

^ metro mayor (www.bristolpost.co.uk)
^ Labour (www.bristolpost.co.uk)
^ Kingswood (www.bristolpost.co.uk)
^ Bristol Live (www.bristolpost.co.uk)
^ Kingswood by-election – everything you need to know (www.bristolpost.co.uk)
^ GBP10,000 bus picture of metro mayor and his dog was so big it was ‘unlawful’ (www.bristolpost.co.uk)
^ Labour Party (www.bristolpost.co.uk)
^ South Gloucestershire (www.bristolpost.co.uk)
^ Bath (www.bristolpost.co.uk)