A Jewish Labour candidate has overturned an 11,000-vote Conservative majority to win the Kingswood by-election.

Damien Egan, who previously served as the directly elected mayor of Lewisham, achieved a swing of 16.4 per cent in the South Gloucestershire constituency.

Hailing his victory on Friday morning, he said Kingswood felt “neglected” after 14 years of Conservative government.

Egan added: "There’s a feeling that no matter how hard you work, you just can’t move forward, and with Rishi’s recession we are left once again paying more and getting less...

“The things that our residents are telling us are the things that Keir and the Labour party have been talking about – the NHS, cost of living crisis, community policing.”

Sir Keir Starmer, said: “This is a fantastic result in Kingswood that shows people are ready to put their trust in a Labour government.

"By winning in this Tory stronghold, we can confidently say that Labour is back in the service of working people and we will work tirelessly to deliver for them … Labour will give Britain its future back.”

Egan, who was born in Ireland but brought up in Britain, converted to Judaism after meeting his Israeli partner.

Speaking to the JC in 2019, he said he had sometimes felt that he was concealing his new religion from his party.

“People do know I’ve converted, it’s not hidden, but it’s not exactly open either,” he said. 

"I’d like to be more open and then feel I can speak up a bit more about issues as they’re happening.”

On a visit to the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in Hendon, Egan said, residents had questioned him about whether Jews would be safe if Labour were to enter government with Jeremy Corbyn as their leader.

"What the Labour party hasn’t recognised is that, for those people, they’ve seen what can happen in the most extreme ways,” he said.

“Today we see rising antisemitism. It’s not like something in the distant past. We’ve seen shootings in synagogues. At my shul, as in synagogues around the country, we take it in turns for the security rota.

"It’s all real, it’s people’s actual lived experience. The Labour Party is failing to understand why people would be so scared.”

Labour, he added, is not “going out of its way to understand” why some Jews were considering leaving the country if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister.

“It is hard to imagine a situation with any other group where Labour would have allowed things to escalate in the way that they have,” he said.

"I can understand why Jews and left-wing Jews wouldn’t want to vote Labour.”

Egan grew up in Kingswood, where at one point he and his mother were made homeless.

He has said that this experience drove him to become a parish councillor at just 21.

The Kingswood by-election was called after former energy minister Chris Skidmore stood down to protest the government’s plans to expand oil and gas production in the North Sea.

The seat, which had not been held by Labour since 2005, is due to be broken into four at the next general election, with much of Kingswood to be subsumed into Jacob Rees-Mogg’s constituency of North East Somerset. 

Egan has been selected to run for Bristol North West.