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From the towering south stand of Everton’s gleaming new riverside football stadium, the Liverpool city region mayor Steve Rotheram is showing off his next big goal to the visiting government minister.
It was not much to look at: acres of industrial wasteland, disused docks and a sorry-looking gothic clock tower, said to be one of only two in the world with six faces.
The hands of the Grade II-listed “dockers’ clock” have not moved for years, an all too fitting symbol of time standing still on this part of the Mersey dockland against the rampant regeneration nearby.
Accompanied by the communities secretary Steve Reed on Thursday morning, Rotheram announced a “once-in-a-generation” development on the 174-hectare (430-acre) site beside the £800m Hill Dickinson stadium. A new government-backed body promises 17,000 new homes and commercial premises over the next 15 years.
It was the latest in a series of quiet but significant wins for Rotheram, whose aides say has adopted a strategy of flying beneath the Westminster radar to get things done. The approach appears to be paying dividends.
In recent months, the Labour mayor has won ministers’ backing for an overnight accommodation levy and a reform of Treasury spending in the regions, campaigns he has led for years.
Multimillion-pound concerts by Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift and the Rolling Stones have returned superstar energy to the city after the 2023 Eurovision song contest.
Less glamorous, but more significant for Liverpudlians, is a transport upgrade including the first new Mersey ferry in 60 years, due to set sail in 2026, while ministers are considering a new high-speed rail line to Manchester and £2.5bn towards a revamp of Liverpool Central, the city’s answer to London’s King’s Cross-St Pancras.
It feels like another job well done for Rotheram, a former bricklayer who became the first Liverpool city region mayor in 2017 after seven years in Westminster. Some in his team are calling him “the Treasury whisperer”.
Liam Thorp, the political editor of the Liverpool Echo, says the mayor has “grown in confidence” after a slow first term that was dogged by Labour infighting: “We’re probably just about now in his third term starting to see some of the wins and progress that he would have wanted to see earlier.”
For years, Rotheram has worked in the shadow of his close friend Andy Burnham, nicknamed the king of the north, who has brought money and political attention to Greater Manchester.
While Burnham is often accused of undermining Keir Starmer to further his own ambitions, his Liverpool neighbour has no designs on No 10.
A senior government official would not be drawn on the contrast between the two mayors but welcomed Rotheram’s approach to “quietly getting on well” with key departments. The source says he has forged a “good, professional relationship” with Whitehall.
Speaking on Friday, the mayor said it was an overheard remark in a Commons corridor in 2010 that drives him on today. He recalls hearing government officials joking about “typical scousers” after a meeting with Liverpool council about funding for a new project.
“It was a feeling of absolute despair, a brick in your stomach that they’re slagging off the city you love,” he says. “It sticks with me to this day … I was very much determined to change that perception.”
Rotheram, 64, was one of eight siblings growing up in 1960s Merseyside when post-industrial decline was in its infancy. He left school at 16 to become a bricklayer, going on to help rebuild the Falkland Islands after the war.
Rotheram and his childhood sweetheart, Sandra, a psychiatric nurse, have three children and still live in the house they bought 36 years ago. He jokes that when they got the keys he promised his wife he would renovate it all himself, adding: “I’m not far off finishing it now.”
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A lifelong Liverpool fan, Rotheram was at Hillsborough for the FA Cup semi-final that resulted in the terrible crush that resulted in the death of 97 fans in 1989.
In 2009, a year before he entered parliament, he revealed he had a ticket for the fatal Leppings Lane end but swapped it 15 minutes before kick-off. “I’m one of the fortunate ones,” he said at the 20th anniversary event, adding that he never discovered what happened to the fan who took his ticket.
The family had a brush with tragedy again in 2017 when their two daughters, Haylie and Samantha, were at the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena where a suicide bomber killed 22 people and injured hundreds more. Mercifully, they escaped unharmed.
Those close to Rotheram say he is reluctant to speak about his personal life in the way many high-profile politicians do, despite aides encouraging him to open up.
He describes his role as “the dream job for any scouser”. But despite holding Labour’s safest non-council seat in Britain – winning 68% of the vote last year – Rotheram fears he could lose to Reform UK without a drastic change of fortunes nationally by 2028, when his mayoralty is next up for election.
The “prevailing political winds” mean no seat is safe any more, he says: “Nobody knows, even if you’ve got a safe seat like mine was last time, you don’t know where the electorate are because they’re so volatile at the moment.
“Rightwing noises resonate in every single one of our communities and we have to be careful. Our barometer will be May next year because we’ve got two all-out [council] elections and two councils with one-third [up for election] and that’s a good polling size of where politics are in the Liverpool city region.”
Asked whether he believes Reform UK could genuinely win the mayoralty in Liverpool, the most solidly Labour city in England, Rotheram says: “At this moment in time, when Labour are doing so poorly in the polls and Reform are riding the crest of a wave until they are caught out – because they will be – if there was to be a snap election it would be very, very difficult for Labour.
“What we need to keep doing is demonstrating that Labour in government, Labour in town halls and in our devolved authorities, are the gamechanger for people.”
Additional reporting by Peter Walker, senior political correspondent
