Updated story: Lewisham’s elected mayor Damien Egan has unveiled his ambition to become an MP – by standing to be a Labour candidate in his home city of Bristol.
Egan will challenge his controversial counterpart in Bristol, Marvin Rees, for the role in the new constituency. He broke cover in an interview with the Bristol Post.
Last summer Rees’s press briefings were boycotted by media in the city after he objected to being quizzed by a BBC-funded local democracy reporter over his decision to fly 9,000 miles to Canada to give a talk about climate change.
Egan has moved to Bristol for the campaign, which is expected to last a month, and will reduce his hours in Lewisham, commuting to and from SE London to carry out his duties. He will be donating his allowance as mayor to Lewisham Foodbank for the duration of the campaign.
In a statement on the Lewisham Labour website, he said: “As you’ll all know, I love Lewisham, our community and the work we’re all doing together for the borough. These are very special circumstances, my family are all in Bristol, and for me this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to represent the place where I’m from.
“Having been through a competitive selection when I stood to be the mayor of Lewisham, I understand that this process will require time and focus.
“Over this period I will reduce my hours on a temporary basis. I will maintain my regular meetings with the acting chief executive, cabinet, uphold key public engagements I’ve committed to and my meet-the-mayor public sessions.
“I will remain responsible for any decision making and urgent matters that may arise and be available in-person when necessary.”
He said he would be delegating some of his work to his deputy, Brenda Dacres, and his cabinet.
Bristol North East is a new constituency – straddling parts of the city and neighbouring South Gloucestershire – and is thought to be a safe Labour seat. It includes areas such as Fishponds, Eastville and Kingswood, where Egan grew up. He cut his teeth in politics sitting on the nearby Downend & Bromley Heath parish council at the age of 21.
It is not Egan’s first attempt to be elected an MP in the region – he stood for Weston-super-Mare in 2005. After moving to London he unsuccessfully stood in Beckenham in 2010 before being elected as a councillor for Lewisham Central four years later.
Egan has been the elected mayor – equivalent to a council leader in other boroughs – of Lewisham since 2018. One of his first acts was to scrap a controversial land deal which led to Millwall football club threatening to leave SE London.
More recently Lewisham became a borough of sanctuary under his leadership and spent last year as London Borough of Culture. While his administration hit controversy over a low-traffic neighbourhood in Lee and Hither Green, which was partly rolled back because of congestion on nearby roads, Labour still won every seat in the borough at the last election and Egan was returned with a bigger majority.
Egan told the Bristol Post that his family “bounced around temporary accommodation” and stayed with friends when they lost their home while he was growing up.
“I don’t share that as a sob story, but more to show that I have that lived experience of what it’s like,” he said.
“I’ve taken that into being the mayor of Lewisham, and made sure that we do the bread and butter well. You can focus on the ‘sexy’ things of local politics, like getting tall, shiny buildings built, or you can focus on the bread and butter – things like adult social care, child welfare, special needs education, schools, affordable homes. We’ve made a real focus in Lewisham of narrowing the definition of affordable housing so that it really is affordable, and not just what developers want to call it. That’s something I’ll take to be the MP here, if I can.”
Egan will need to get onto a longlist of candidates, before a committee of party of party officials whittles it down to a shortlist of four candidates. Local Labour members will then vote on who they want to have as their candidate.
One of Egan’s former colleagues in SE London, the former Lewisham East MP Heidi Alexander, was picked to be the candidate for South Swindon last year, but Greenwich councillor Chris Lloyd pulled out of the race for North Swindon after also being picked. Kevin Bonavia, a former Blackheath councillor and cabinet member in Lewisham, is standing in Stevenage.
Story updated at 2.20pm to clarify that Egan has moved to Bristol for the campaign and to quote him on his plans for running Lewisham.
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