Steve Rotheram says 'this might surprise you' as he singles out one Tory minister he liked

Steve Rotheram said his third term mayor of the Liverpool City Region is "genuinely exciting" because now he is working with a Labour government, after suffering seven years of "sub-optimal" prime ministers under the Tories. Despite his frustration with the previous government, he was able to name one Tory minister who impressed him.

In a fringe event called 'In conversation with Steve Rotheram' today at the Museum of Liverpool, the metro mayor talked at length about the achievements he is most proud of as mayor and what he hopes to do for the region now Labour are back in power.

Referring to the problem of 'revolving doors' at Westminster under the Tories - which saw five prime ministers in the eight year period between 2016 and 2024 - Mr Rotheram said: "The difficulty that a lot of people might not understand is, whilst it is seen as a bit of fun, and there was some schadenfreude for me, when somebody else comes in, you have to start from square one and try to build up relationships."

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Now a Labour government has been elected, Mr Rotheram is confident the Liverpool City Region will benefit, thanks in part to his personal relationships with members of the government. He said: "I was elected as a member of parliament in 2010 and if you look at the cabinet, most of them are from the 2010 intake, so they're all people I started with and we all cut our teeth together. And that makes it so much easier, because they're friends. I can just pick up the phone to them, rather than the stuff we had to do with the previous lot."

He added: "Most relationships are based on trust. I couldn't trust most of those people down there. The best of the lot - and this might surprise you - was Michael Gove. He was a c**p dancer, but he could run a department. When you went down there and said, 'we want to do x, y and z', department-wise, they'd kick into gear."

When asked to name the highlights of his time as metro mayor, Mr Rotheram cited three areas of success, all in the transport realm: trains, new ferries and cycling. He said he was proud to have "bought our trains", which he described as good economics, and "not an ideological thing", and said it saved the region £6m per year.

The mayor said he would "love" to bring trams back to the city and discussed previous attempts to revive the tram network in the region. "I would love a tram here," he said. "Just imagine how it would animate the city and the city region."

Looking to the future, Mr Rotheram is hopeful of expanding Liverpool's housing stock with new council houses. He said: ""I always said I want to do council house building. The impediment to us doing that was that we have to open something called a HRA - a Housing Revenue Account. And if we open it, there's still liabilities from when the Tories sold off the houses, so we couldn't do it that way.

He continued: "Now the Labour government has come in and Angela [Rayner] has said there is the possibility - it hasn't been announced yet - but there's a possibility that metro mayors can open up HRAs. If you do that, we can start building council houses again."