Andy Preston interview: The independent Middlesbrough mayor taking on the political establishment

In October last year, the people of the North started to rise up in revolt over lockdown policies which local leaders felt left them out of the decision-making.  The protest began as a grumbling, first from Newcastle Council chief Nick Forbes, from Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson.

Then the Mayor of Middlesbrough, Andy Preston, ditched the deferential rhetoric in favour of a more defiant pose. In a video on Facebook, Preston said he would “defy the government” over a local lockdown in his region. This was, in some sense, a confusing position.

Preston was the mayor who had previously faced criticism for closing public parks against government advice. And when we speak over Facetime, Preston says he had also told shops and restaurants to enforce social distancing and mask-wearing before the government did. “I got a barrage of abuse from all quarters for that”.

Middlesbrough is the poorest council borough in England, and the most vulnerable to Covid. The cost of this disease and of the threat of economic collapse from efforts to halt its spread, are hard to separate and even harder to prioritise.

While Preston believes that in the third lockdown people have been “more compliant”, he thinks poor adherence to the rules has been the biggest failure. It’s one he seems determined to remedy. As we finish our conversation, he says he’s getting texts from residents alerting him to rule-breakers. “I’m getting messages now saying, ‘my neighbour’s having a party on Saturday, it’s the third time in a row’. Because I’m active on social media, people contact me with this info and I relay that to the police and their own teams.”

It comes across like a modern-day Salem, but Preston believes proper enforcement of the rules could have allowed the town to balance lives and livelihoods over the past year. The government was “way too soft” initially, before swinging too far the other way. The police were arresting the wrong people, such as dog-walkers, while letting venues and pub-goers off the hook for their share of responsibility.

Preston’s social media commands a relatively small following, but his output is prolific. Most weeks he’s filming himself. He is updating residents regularly on Covid rules; promoting local jobs partnerships or planned development on one of Middlesbrough’s many brown-field sites. Being an active politician, a disruptor, is central to Preston’s image.

A former hedge-fund banker and philanthropist, his majority-independent council was elected in 2019. His election reflects a community disillusioned with mainstream politics ­– after failing to beat Labour’s Dave Budd in 2015, Preston earned nearly 60 per cent of the vote in 2019 – nearly twice as much as the two mainstream parties combined.

It makes for an unorthodox politics. On poor relief ­– such as the half-term free school meals debacle last year ­– Preston has taken a positive stance, he says, to “show solidarity with the poorest in our community”. But in areas like development and crime ­– Middlesbrough’s drug deaths peaked last year and are among the highest in England – Preston is more conservative, emphasising apprenticeships, investment and law-and-order.

Indeed, there is a deliberate anti-establishment bravado to Preston. “I’m the political establishment’s worst nightmare”, he tells me. “What we have in Middlesbrough is a new spirit which is more compassionate than Labour and more pro-business than the Tories”.

That disruptive confidence hasn’t made governing any easier. “As a city mayor, I get complaints for potholes, anti-social behaviour, streetlights not working, in absurd cases the BBC not being very good”, he tells me, “but the amount of challenge-stroke-abuse I get has grown exponentially.” Preston pauses before “abuse”, then clarifies: “I’m not whingeing about it.”

He does take a shot at the local Labour party, though, whose scorn for him is apparently personal. Preston tells me about “Diet coke-gate”, an absurd story that emerged in the lead-up to his election. Preston was charged with bribing a voter in a pub by offering to buy him a soft drink. The man in question turned out to be the brother-in-law of Preston’s Labour rival for the mayorship. It’s one story in an apparent saga of besiegement from the local establishment. Preston later accused the party of playing similar “dirty tricks” with Antony High, Preston’s vice-mayor and independent candidate for the 2019 parliamentary elections.

“Not only have I taken [the local Labour party’s] power, status and sense of normality, and they feel bereaved, [but] we’re getting stuff done”, Preston says, confident of his plans for the city’s rejuvenation after Covid. He’s eager to tell me about Middlesbrough’s plan to get tablets or iPads to every schoolchild – a first in the UK – and about new business developments in the area.

Preston’s sense of action can barely be contained, nor his eagerness to get things moving again. “I suspect it could be speeded up”, he says of the government’s current exit-plan. It’s not the first time Preston has had qualms with government action. If the political response to the pandemic has revealed anything about the inner workings of the state, that frustration is only likely to continue.