Metro Mayor Dan Norris has been appointed Labor MP for the general election

West of England metro mayor Dan Norris has been selected by Labor as this year’s general election candidate – where he will renew his battle with Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.

The Labor politician was named the party’s candidate for the new seat of North East Somerset and Hanham at the election, and Mr Norris told Bristol Live that if elected he plans to do both jobs – MP and metro mayor.

Mr Norris was MP for the same area from 1997 until he was defeated by Jacob Rees Mogg in the 2010 general election. After a time away from frontline politics, he returned to win Labour’s nomination for mayor of the metro west of England in 2021, won the election and has been in office for the past three years.

Read more: The race to take on Jacob Rees Mogg – the Labor candidate’s interesting decision

Read more: ‘I can do both jobs,’ says Metro Mayor Dan Norris

Mr Norris was elected 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 which includes Keynsham and North East Somerset, which has undergone regular boundary changes. After coming third in the 1987 general election in the old seat of Northavon, which covered most of South Gloucestershire, he stood for Labor in 1992 in Wansdyke and lost again.

But Mr Norris stood again in Wansdyke – which covers much of what is now north-east Somerset – to win a Labor seat in 1997. He won two more general elections in Wansdyke in 2001 and 2005 and was 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 the Conservative Mr Rees-Mogg. Mogg has been an MP there for 14 years and the constituency has undergone several boundary changes and a different name before the 2024 general election.

Southern areas such as Radstock and Midsomer Norton changed to a different Somerset constituency, while the area now includes parts of South Gloucestershire which made up just under half of the old seat of Kingswood, 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 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 mayoral election is not until May 2025, and in January Mr Norris told Bristol Live that if elected and then elected as an MP, he believed he could fulfill both roles.

“Elsewhere in the country, other people have shown that it’s possible to do both,” Mr. Norris said, pointing to two examples. Dan Jarvis has been the MP for Barnsley since 2011 and was also the metro mayor for South Yorkshire for four years from 2018 to 2022, and Boris Johnson was mayor of London until May 2016, a year after he was also elected as Uxbridge MP in 2015.

“It’s possible for us to be both and clearly we have the convention that MPs can also be ministers – which I was – and that’s something like that – so there’s a lot of precedent for someone to be both an MP and a mayor by metro, whether for a shorter or longer period,” he added.