The West of England metro mayor Dan Norris has been selected by Labour as a candidate in the General Election this year - where he will renew his battle with Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The Labour politician has been named as the party’s candidate for the new North East Somerset and Hanham seat at the election, and Mr Norris has told Bristol Live that if he’s elected, he intends to do both jobs - MP and metro mayor.
Mr Norris was the MP for the same area from 1997 until he was beaten by Jacob Rees Mogg in the 2010 General Election. After time away from front line politics, he returned to win Labour’s nomination for West of England metro mayor in 2021, won the election and has been in post for the past three years.
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Mr Norris was chosen ahead of two other local candidates, Becky Montacute and James Coldwell, in what was described as a closely-fought selection process. It will be the seventh time Mr Norris has stood for parliament, and the sixth for the area that includes Keynsham and North East Somerset, which has undergone regular boundary changes. After coming third in the 1987 General Election in the old Northavon seat that covered most of South Gloucestershire, he stood for Labour in 1992 in Wansdyke and lost again.
But Mr Norris stood again in Wansdyke - which covers much of the present-day North East Somerset - to win the seat for Labour in 1997. He won two more General Elections in Wansdyke in 2001 and 2005, and was the MP for the area for 13 years.
In 2010, a new name and some boundary changes turned the seat into North East Somerset, and he lost to Conservative Mr Rees-Mogg. Mogg has been the MP there for 14 years, and the constituency has undergone more boundary changes and another new name ahead of the 2024 General Election.
Areas in the south like Radstock and Midsomer Norton have changed to a different Somerset constituency, while the area now includes parts of South Gloucestershire that made up just under half the old Kingswood seat, including Hanham and Cadbury Heath.
When he announced he wanted to stand for North East Somerset, Mr Norris told Bristol Live he believed he could do both the jobs - metro mayor and local MP.
The West of England combined authority covers the whole of Bristol, South Gloucestershire and Bath and North East Somerset. The next metro mayor election is not until May 2025, and back in January Mr Norris told Bristol Live that, if selected and then elected as an MP, 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,” he added.
