Conservative party leader David Cameron visited the Daily Post offices today, as part of a whistlestop Liverpool tour.
He was also the main speaker at the CBI's Merseyside Celebration Dinner at St George's Hall last night, an event at which I was a guest.
It was the first opportunity I had had to see him deliver a speech, and I have to say that he is a very impressive performer. He talked at length, without reference to a script or an autocue, without losing his thread or hestitating once. At the end of his main speech, he took questions from the floor for several minutes, and dealt with them just as fluently as he had delivered his address.
The accusation was put to him that, while he makes all the right noises, there is little substance to what he has to say, and he is light on policies.
He assured the audience that we would be hearing a lot more in the way of definite policy commitments from him in the next few weeks. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with.
What is undeniable is that he faces a huge challenge if his party is to establish any kind of significant power base in and around Liverpool again. It seems unthinkable now, with not a single Tory councillor on Liverpool city council, that two or three generations ago the Conservatives actually ran the local authority.
But British politics are going through a very uncertain stage, with Gordon Brown so new in the job he has coveted, and there is a very real possibility that Cameron could be our Prime Minister before long.
That poses interesting questions of its own for Liverpool, with its strange mixture of Lib Dem councillors and Labour MPs. Would we be able to do business with a Conservative government more effectively than we have with the current administration?
We probably don't have much to lose. Despite its staunch parliamentary support for Labour, the city region hasn't exactly been on the receiving end of conspicuous largesse under Tony Blair. Remember the trams?
Could a Conservative government anxious to build bridges with the big cities actually be better for us than Labour? It is a possibility you can't discount, ironic though it may sound.
Our business editor, Bill Gleeson, interviewed David Cameron in our offices this morning, and you can see a video of that interview on our website later today.
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