A former Downing Street advisor to Boris Johnson has been picked to contest the county’s newest parliamentary constituency for the Conservatives.

Katie Lam, now a special advisor to Home Secretary Suella Braverman, won a tightly contested selection battle for the Weald of Kent seat.

Three other contenders had vied for what is expected to be a safe constituency the Tories should win, encompassing Tenterden and leafy villages such as Biddenden which previously fell under Ashford.

Lam was deputy chief of staff to Boris Johnson in Number 10 and a vice-president at Goldman Sachs. She studied classics at Cambridge and is also a former President of the Cambridge Union and Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association.

Outside politics, she is a well-regarded and award-winning lyricist and script-writer, whose works have been performed in the West End and off-Broadway.

The other candidates were: Aphra Brandreth, Kingston and Surbiton candidate in 2019, and the daughter of the former MP for Chester and now TV presenter Giles Brandreth; Scott Pattenden, a former candidate for East Ham and the European Parliament and London Conservatives’ Deputy Chairman; and Lincoln Jopp, a highly-decorated former soldier.

The seat has already had an unexpected bout of publicity when association members rejected an application from the Ashford MP Damian Green.

It was thought initially that this represented some kind of snub to Mr Green but reportedly was a signal from activists that they wanted to choose who should be the candidate, not the Conservatives’ Central Office.

The seat is roughly made up of about 35% of the old Maidstone constituency and 36% of Ashford, with the rest divided among Faversham and Mid Kent and Folkestone.

According to Electoral Calculus, which tracks opinion polls, it has a notional majority of about 27,000 and is one of the safest in the country.