TOM Bewick has become the third city councillor to put himself in the running to become the next Labour MP in Brighton Kemptown.

Cllr Bewick joins fellow councillors Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Daniel Yates in a hotly contested battle for a seat offering hopefuls the best chance of winning a seat back for Labour in the South East.

A “centrist social democrat”, Cllr Bewick said he would offer the party a candidate who could not be portrayed as “extremist” or “Loony Left” by the Conservatives.

Cllr Bewick told The Argus it was a constituency he knew well having moved to Brighton Kemptown in the 2000s from London.

He said he had a track record of winning Conservative seats, having won Westbourne at the Brighton and Hove City Council elections in May 2015.

Cllr Bewick, who was chairman of the Brighton and Hove Leave campaign last summer, said Brighton Kemptown was a seat the party should have won in 2015.

He said he was well placed to deliver a “breakthrough” with disenchanted Labour voters who had moved to Ukip or the Conservatives or who had stopped voting altogether.

He said: “The party has always been a broad church, I have been a moderate social democrat all my life. I will not be a candidate the Conservatives could depict as an extremist, or in tabloid parlance, a member of the Loony Left.

“Just after Jeremy Corbyn’s second election, I stressed publicly the need to unite behind the leader. I have never criticised Jeremy publicly but I have also never hidden the fact who I voted for in the leadership elections.”

Cllr Bewick, who is the co-owner of an apprenticeship company and served as an adult skills advisor to Tony Blair’s Government, said he had hoped to stand in 2020 but Theresa May’s shock announcement on Tuesday had caused an abrupt change of plans.

He added: “From my time campaigning for Leave in the constituency last summer, the general feeling was that he [Simon Kirby] was not pulling his weight and was not politically involved in the local issues.

“The Labour Party is fully accepting and respecting of the outcome from last June and has come round to my way of thinking during that campaign.

Cllr Bewick stood down from his role as children, young people and skills committee chairman in January claiming he was finding it increasingly difficult balancing the “heavy burden” of his own business interests, his family and overseeing the work of one of the council’s biggest departments.

He said by standing he hoped to focus more on representing his Hove ward.

Yesterday, he told The Argus: “I have always had ambitions to stand but this timetable is not my choosing. Fortunately I am in a position where I can realign business interests if I have to. There were issues back in January and something needed to give because I had to focus on issues which I have done.

“If I was lucky enough to be selected and then elected, I would be a fully-paid up member of Parliament, I would not be doing a George Osborne and have six jobs on the go. Standing for election is a full-time job.”