When Marvin Rees was named last night as Labour’s candidate for the Bristol mayoral election, he immediately became favourite to become the city’s first mayor. Not just because Labour are the first major party to announce their nomination, but because British politics has long been dominated by political allegiance to parties rather than people.

Rees is a 40-year-old programme manager who is currently part of an NHS team reviewing Bristol’s £50m mental health service contract.

In July, he is due to launch the Bristol Leadership Programme, what his LinkedIn profile describes as “investing in the personal development, leadership skills and life planning of high ability, high aspiration young people from disadvantaged backgrounds”.

He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist for both the BBC and ITV, as a political campaigner and charity coordinator for the Black Development Agency, and Sojourners and Tearfund, Christian social justice and development charities.

Writing for Labour pressure group Progress last month, Rees described his upbringing: “I have lived and worked across the best and worst of what Bristol has to offer.

“At its worst Bristol was the city that seemed to offer families like mine little hope of a future that was anything more than the backgrounds we came from.

“I was one of two brown-skinned children of a single white women (sic). We were poor. We lived on an out-of-town housing estate called Lawrence Weston before moving to Lawrence Hill in the inner city. Both remain among the most deprived wards in the UK sitting in a city with some of the wealthiest wards in Europe.

“At its best Bristol was the city in which I found the support and opportunity I needed to escape my hopelessness, to get to university, to make a contribution to my community and city and take a life journey that took me to Yale University’s World Fellows Program and the offer of admission to Harvard Kennedy School.”

That last line is puzzling and one which Rees has repeated elsewhere, because even though he chose not to go Harvard, he still stresses that they offered him a place.

Groomed since last year on the Labour Party Future Candidates Programme, which provides training and mentoring support to potential future Labour representatives, be they MPs, MSPs or mayors, Rees is a highly competent and qualified candidate, although he may suffer from currently having no strong standing in Bristol.

In his victory speech to Labour members last night, he declared: “I have said throughout the selection campaign, that the people of Bristol voted for change in the recent referendum, and I am determined to lead the change which Bristol has voted for.”