The mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, has challenged Boris Johnson to visit the city and apologise directly for once publishing an article claiming drunken fans were partly responsible for the Hillsborough tragedy, after it was reported the government was reluctant to hold a major conference in the city.
Anderson said on Sunday he had offered to host what the government has billed as “the biggest ever northern powerhouse conference” on 13 September after Sheffield, the initial prospective host, could not find a suitable venue. But he said his offer of the Arena and Convention Centre, which hosted last year’s Labour party conference, had been turned down.
It is understood Johnson has not been formally invited to the conference and No 10 rejected any suggestion he was blocking or delaying the decision.
With barely a month to go, Downing Street has still not revealed where the conference will take place.
It adds salt to wounds first opened up when Johnson chose Manchester as the venue for his first speech as the prime minister last month, using it to back a new high-speed rail link between Manchester and Leeds without making any mention of Liverpool.
It was a “shortsighted omission”, said Anderson, who insisted more people currently travel by rail between Liverpool and Manchester than Manchester to Leeds.
Asked if Johnson would get a “warm welcome” were he to visit Liverpool, Anderson said: “He’d get a hot welcome. It wouldn’t be warm.”
Anderson said Liverpudlians had not forgotten the editorial Johnson published when he was the editor of the Spectator, in 2004, which claimed the people of Liverpool were “hooked on grief” and blamed “drunken fans” for contributing to the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 in which 96 people were killed.
The Liverpool Echo had originally reported the city was being overlooked in the deliberations on who would host September’s Convention of the North. “There is a feeling in the local halls of power that government simply doesn’t want to come here,” the paper had said.
Shortly before Johnson entered Downing Street, the paper also ran a story with the headline “Liverpool won’t forget what prime minister hopeful Boris Johnson did”.
During his first prime minister’s questions, Johnson refused to apologise for publishing the remarks when he was reminded of them by the Labour MP for Garston and Halewood, Maria Eagle.
Back in 2012, when he was still mayor of London, Johnson had said he “bitterly regretted” the offence caused, but insisted he did not write the offending article.
“If he came into the city and apologised directly then he might have a better chance of being given more respect, rather than just saying sorry from down south,” Anderson said.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), which announced the conference last month, would not say where the conference would be held, only that the government was proud to support it. He added the matter of the venue was for the organisers, the Northern Powerhouse 11, a group of northern local enterprise partnership chairs.
Shortly before Johnson became prime minister, MHCLG put out a press release heralding the second cross-party convention of the north, which would bring together civic and business leaders with council leaders and elected mayors from all of the north’s towns, cities and city regions to “speak with one voice”.