Lewisham’s former elected mayor Damien Egan has become an MP after winning the Kingswood by-election for Labour.

Egan, who stepped down last month to contest the election, overturned a Conservative majority of more than 11,000 in the Gloucestershire seat to win with a majority of more than 2,000. He told the BBC that winning the seat “feels amazing” but that there’s “so much to do”.

His win was one of two significant by-election victories for Labour – the other being in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire – as the countdown to the general election continues. 

Egan, who was brought up in the area, had already been selected as Labour’s candidate for the new seat of Bristol North East, but was drafted in for the trickier proposition of Kingswood — which is being abolished at the next election — after the resignation of its Conservative MP, Chris Skidmore, last month.

Back in SE London, Egan’s decision to pursue a career in Westminster means a by-election for a new mayor in Lewisham, which will be held on March 7. 

Seven candidates have been confirmed, with Labour’s Brenda Dacres, Egan’s deputy and current Deptford councillor, the overwhelming favourite to win. She has been acting mayor since Egan — who won 58 per cent of the vote in 2022 — stepped down.

The Greens, who came a distant second last time with 16 per cent of the vote, are fielding Michael Herron, while Siama Qadar is standing for the Conservatives. 

Chris Maines, a former councillor, is running for the Liberal Democrats in his fifth attempt to become Lewisham’s mayor, while veteran left-wing activist John Hamilton is standing for the Workers’ Party of Britain.

Maureen Martin is standing for the Christian People’s Alliance, while Nick Long, a left-wing  independent, is standing on a platform of abolishing the position of elected mayor. 

Lewisham is one of a handful of London boroughs run by a mayor elected by residents rather than an old-style council leader, as in Greenwich, who is effectively picked by their party’s councillors in a behind-closed-doors vote. Residents narrowly backed using a mayoral system in a referendum in October 2001.

Whoever wins this by-election will be Lewisham’s third elected mayor, after Egan and Sir Steve Bullock, who held the role for 16 years from 2002. Labour won all the seats on Lewisham Council at the election in May 2022, although one councillor, Hay-Yu Tam in Evelyn ward, has since been suspended from the party.

The timing of the by-election means a poll will cost about £635,000, according to an answer given at a Lewisham council meeting last year. A win for Dacres would mean yet another by-election, this time on a smaller scale, to replace her as a councillor in Deptford.

• Nas Asghar, a Greenwich Labour councillor, has lost out in an attempt to be selected as a candidate in Coventry, the city where she is from. She said on her Twitter profile, which has now been made private, that she was “disappointed not to have made the shortlist for Coventry East, my home constituency”. Asghar was elected for Plumstead Common ward in May 2022. Lauren Dingsdale, a councillor for Eltham Town & Avery Hill, tried to be selected for Beckenham & Penge last October but did not make it onto the shortlist.