FOR a fully paid-up member of a seemingly endangered species, Neville Goldrein looks remarkably confident.

Perhaps he has good reason to be. After 13 years out of office, the Conservative Party is back in Downing Street with a little help from its new Lib-Dem friends, and the political map of Merseyside has some new-found spots of blue.

Liverpool, it is true, remains a Tory-free zone, but hope springs eternal in the breast of the man who, a quarter of a century ago, was the last local Conservative leader to have a real influence over the city’s future.

At the height of the Thatcher era in the 1980s, the Tories were able to take control of the Merseyside County Council, with Neville Goldrein as their leader.

Liverpool itself remained obstinately Labour, but with the Conservatives in power at Westminster as well, and also at Metropolitan House, the County Council’s HQ, there was little choice but for everyone to rub along together as best they could.

It didn’t last. The metropolitan county councils, created only 12 years previously by Ted Heath’s Tory government of the early 1970s, fell victim to Thatcher’s reforming zeal, but for a short time the voice of Merseyside came in shades of blue.

The County Council leadership was to be the high point in a 30-year political career for Neville Goldrein, and by the end of the 1980s he had stepped down from front-line politics, although he remains an influential father-figure in Conservative circles.

Now, having retired from his legal career – he was a solicitor who later became a judge – he can put his feet up, enjoy himself and mull over the 34 volumes of scrapbooks he has assembled going right back to his schooldays in the late 1930s.

It is these scrapbooks that have prompted him to put together an account of his life, produced by the self-publishing specialist company, Authorhouse.

For someone so identified with the Conservatives on three councils – Crosby, Lancashire and Merseyside – it is a little surprising he has not come from a traditional Tory background.