Steve Rotheram is a shoo-in for re-election. But what does he stand for?
Steve Rotheram is a shoo-in for re-election. But what does he stand for?
Buses, barrages, and a bunker mentality: we give the lowdown on the metro mayor as he gears up for a third term
Dear readers — next week Steve Rotheram will almost certainly begin a third term as mayor of the Liverpool City Region. He’s certainly got grand plans; 100,000 new trees, increased foreign investment, a new publicly operated railway between Liverpool and Manchester, a new ferry, a massive programme of house building and of course — his pièce de résistance: the long-since touted tidal barrage across the River Mersey. In today’s edition, The New Statesman’s Jonny Ball stops by to give us his take on the race, and on what a third term under Rotheram might mean.
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Former Birkenhead MP Frank Field has died at the age of 81. Field, a Labour Minister under Tony Blair, crossbench peer, and MP in the Wirral for four decades, died on Tuesday night after revealing he was terminally ill in 2021. Shortly after his cancer diagnosis, while spending time in a hospice, Field backed a bill to slacken restrictions on assisted dying. Many have paid tributes, including Blair, who said: “Frank had integrity, intelligence and deep commitment to the causes he believed in. He was an independent thinker never constrained by conventional wisdom”.
The biggest vape bust-up in Liverpool history went down on Tuesday, when over £40,000 worth of illegal devices were seized from a city-centre shop. This has tripled the council’s previous record: the shake-down was described by the Liverpool Echo as their “largest swoop” to date. The unregulated vapes often contain banned substances and unpermitted quantities of nicotine, in line with government regulations set out in 2016.
And in Everton, a car crashed into a primary school earlier this week, only minutes before the pupils were due to arrive. Pictures of the scene show a white Mercedes amongst the brick rubble of a classroom wall in The Beacon Primary School. Merseyside Police confirmed that no school children were present, though a passenger of the car has sustained a minor injury.
Buses, barrages, and a bunker mentality: What is Steve Rotheram for?
By Jonny Ball
Steve Rotheram is lucky in his opponents. Facing a set of mayoral candidates that leave much to be desired, it seems near-certain that he is going to be re-elected next week. Jade Marsden, the Conservative hopeful who came in a distant second last time around with 20% of the vote, would do well to equal her 2021 tally given the state of her party’s national polling. Perhaps that explains why she spent much of her time on BBC Radio Merseyside’s mayoral election debate distancing herself from the statements of senior Conservatives and congratulating Rotheram on his policy successes. Rob McAllister-Bell, the Liberal Democrat, peppered his contributions with several egregious pronunciations of the word “mayoralty”, which he seemed to think was the same as “morality”. Depends on who the mayor is, I suppose.
Against a weak set of debate performances from the other candidates, Rotheram’s relative competence and good delivery shone through. Marsden seemed decent enough, but there’s little in her plans to distinguish her as a candidate. She must be brave (or just a glutton for punishment) to stand twice in a region in which the very word “Tory” tends to be spat out venomously as an insult, at least in some parts. Listening to McAllister-Bell speak is the audio equivalent of watching Bambi on ice. The Greens’ Tom Crone puts up a fight, but his party will always find it difficult to break outside of their comfort zones.
It is sometimes said that if you pinned a red rosette on a donkey in Liverpool, they would be in with a fair chance at the ballot box. This hasn’t always been the case. Liverpool was a working-class Tory town for long after its northern industrial neighbours became socialist heartlands. In the noughties, when the rest of the UK was doing Blairite Cool Britannia, the Liberal Democrats ran the council.
But those days are all long gone. There is currently only one show in town, and it’s the Labour Party. And, of course, it helps that he sits atop an institution based in a city that registers autocratic-strongman-style Labour majorities in all five of its constituencies. Only one of the broader city region’s 15 MPs isn’t Labour — and this may well change to a full Labour house whenever we have a general election.
Rotheram is also helped along the way by a local legacy press that’s happy to toe the line. The political editor of the Liverpool Echo even found time to ghostwrite the mayor’s latest book, Head North, which reads like a particularly long-winded piece of campaign literature.
Yet all is not well at Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCR) headquarters on Mann Island. As incoming listeners’ texts were read out in the BBC Radio Merseyside mayoral debate, one simply named as “Charlie the taxi driver” wrote in to ask: “what is the role of the metro mayor?” A statement from the independent candidate, Ian Smith, claimed that “the vast majority of people on my travels, collecting signatures for the mayoral process, pretty much didn’t know we had a metro mayor, or anything that they do.” Few would say the same of Andy Burnham in neighbouring Greater Manchester, or indeed Andy Street in the West Midlands.
Security can breed complacency, and Steve Rotheram is operating without the constraints of a robust local opposition, a crusading local press, or indeed an electorate familiar with the intricacies of the patchwork, ad hoc nature of English devolution over the last seven years. And who can blame them? Until recently, if someone had asked a Liverpool resident who their mayor was, three names could have legitimately been given: Rotheram the city region mayor, along with the city mayor of Liverpool (a post now abolished), and the Lord mayor.
Regardless, Rotheram is the city region’s most powerful politician. So what do we know about him? Aside from his allegedly bland diet — a few weeks back we exclusively broke the news that the mayor has such an apparent distaste for vegetables he once scrapped a bowlful of beautifully-steamed greens away at an Indonesian restaurant (Rotheram denied this rumour in good humour on X) — we were also keen to hear from those who have worked closely alongside him.
A former LCR staffer reports that a bunker mentality has developed within Rotheram’s office. “He is becoming increasingly distant from officers,” they tell me. “He doesn't know what he wants to achieve, and so it's really hard for him to lead.” Fair employment, green ambitions, there’s plenty of lofty promise but it’s harder to drill down on the details, they add.
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