The fall of the Regional Director: Who is Liam Didsbury?
Just two weeks after an election triumph, a highly influential Labour figure has stepped down
Dear readers – a fortnight into a new Labour government, you may think all is peaceful and serene in the party that has just won a historic landslide. Yesterday the government announced an expansive agenda in the King’s Speech (some details in our mini-briefing below) and local MPs – all of them with red rosettes after Tory Southport finally fell – now find themselves on the governing side.
But sweet electoral victory and grand plans for the future are not what many local Labour people are talking about this week. In fact, when you get on the phone with Labour insiders, councillors and activists, as we have in the past few days, what they want to natter about is a man called Liam Didsbury, a behind-the-scenes puller of strings.
Rumours have been swirling since we broke the news that Didsbury is quitting as Labour’s North West director. Some have darkly muttered about what might be behind his decision to leave a post that gave him extraordinary control over who gets ahead in Labour politics — including fiddling around with candidate lists for MP and councillor races and even determining who leads local authorities.
Labour insists that Didsbury has quit of his own volition, “in order to spend more time with his young family”. When we relayed other theories circulating among Labour figures, the party was utterly insistent. “The Regional Director's decision to leave was entirely his own, and any claims to the contrary are wholly untrue,” a spokesperson told us yesterday. “Claims put to the Party regarding the Regional Director's conduct are utterly baseless and defamatory, they have no basis in reality.”
So who is Liam Didsbury, and why are so many people so interested in his departure? Many readers will probably never have heard of him before – he’s not an MP or a mayor, after all. But it’s clear from our conversations that he is someone who wielded a lot of power in the party – and built up a lot of enemies. So we thought we would try to take you behind the curtains in the hope that we can learn something about how local politics really works.
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By Abi Whistance
This week we learned that the regional director of Labour North West, an influential man called Liam Didsbury, has quit his role just a fortnight after the party won the General Election. According to a party spokesperson, Didsbury has resigned “in order to spend more time with his young family”.
His resignation came as a surprise. Didsbury, while relatively unknown to people outside of the inner circles of regional politics, has played a major role in selecting MPs and officials across Merseyside since his appointment in 2021. So much so that one Labour insider told The Post that he had “unprecedented control” over the regional party, adding – with a touch of hyperbole – that his position was that of “the most powerful person in the North West.”
Perhaps this is why when we approached Labour about this story, they repeatedly tried to dissuade us from publishing, even threatening us with legal action. According to a spokesperson, any story about Didsbury’s departure is “not within the public interest” because he is a member of party staff and not a public representative. “Labour Party staff members are entirely inappropriate [subjects for an article] and shouldn't be written [about] in the first place,” they told us.
This is a novel and somewhat confusing argument. After all, for the last three years, Didsbury has been making decisions that will have profound consequences for the region. In his time as regional director, he has overseen and intervened in the appointment of council leaders and police commissioners, and has had a major role in deciding who makes the shortlist to become a Labour MP. Working alongside him has been regional communications officer Anthony Lavelle — a 28-year-old Croxteth councillor who previously ran for mayor of Liverpool — and Sheila Murphy, an officer in charge of Liverpool and an influential figure in the party for over five decades.
Our reporting suggests several officials elected on their watch have had close personal or working relationships with the trio. We’ve found interventions by the regional Labour Party in council elections to appoint these close associates and a lack of due process in the appointment of police and crime commissioners in Merseyside. We've spoken to an array of councillors, party staffers and other Labour insiders. They’re willing to make some pretty strong allegations (for example, claiming the party “rewards loyalty and being friends over actual competence”) but none have had the courage to go on the record. And we’ve also uncovered links between Didsbury and a man who was arrested for witness intimidation in connection to Operation Aloft: the long running police corruption probe linked to former mayor Joe Anderson.
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