Chris Lloyd begins a series of profiles of the candidates for Tees Valley mayor with veteran politician Chris Foote Wood

STANDING for the Liberal Democrats is a legend of the ballot box, a veteran campaigner: Chris Foote Wood.

“This is my 43rd election,” he says. “Eight Parliamentary, six Europeans and the mayor of Middlesbrough. I was first elected to Bishop Auckland Urban District Council is 1967 and I was re-elected until I stood down in 2007.

“I love it. I can’t stop.”

Now 76, he first stood for a council – Newcastle City – in 1963, and he made his debut on a Parliamentary platform at Newcastle North at the February 1974 General Election. Yet his first brush with the electoral process was much earlier.

“My father was Liberal agent for Bury and Radcliffe in the 1951 election when I was ten and I was his gopher – the Liberal Party never had any money,” he says, remembering his Cheshire roots, where he grew up with his sister, the comedienne Victoria Wood who was 13 years his junior. “I thought it was marvellous because people were so enthusiastic about voting – it was one of the biggest turnouts ever.

“But my father urged me to make my own mind up, and when I was 14, I got the three manifestos and decided the Liberal Party was for me – I believe in individual freedom and ownership allied with a social conscience and responsibility.”

He came over the Pennines to study civil engineering at King’s College in Durham, and became a bridge-builder, working on the A1(M) through County Durham and the A19 Tees flyover – this may explain why the principal plank of his mayoral candidacy is a superbridge at South Bank.

He then became a journalist, running his own sport and news agency, and serially standing for election with his second wife, Frances, acting as his agent.

The Northern Echo:

The oldest picture of Chris Foote Wood in The Northern Echo archive, from October 1976

“When we married in 1977, Frances said she didn’t want to be the second Mrs Wood and so I changed my name by deed poll to join our two names together,” says Foote Wood. “And Frances pointed out that it would also lift me up the ballot paper.”

Their high point came in the late 1970s when they built up the Liberal vote in the Labour stronghold of Bishop Auckland to such an extent that the Wear Valley council fell under their control for six years.

“We saved Bishop Auckland Town Hall,” he says. “Under Labour it had closed, was derelict and in danger of being demolished. Frances organised a petition with 10,000 signatures and I looked after the political side, and we got £4m put into it to provide a new library, theatre and art gallery which brought it back into public use. We saved it.”

Francis died in 2013. “I was her carer in her last months and that’s very precious to me,” he says, “and the last thing she told me was that I had to carry on and so I am only obeying orders.”

He has many interests – his books on everything from piers to his late sister, his lectures, one man shows, acting as a non-religious wedding and funeral celebrant – but he says he’d give them all up to become mayor.

“I seriously think I was made to be mayor,” he says. “I have the experience, the personality, the vision, the dedication. I can maximise the value of this job. The devolution deal is a marvellous document, but it is all well ministers signing it, the problem will be the bureaucracy not wanting to pass down the powers. But I will make it happen. I will make people sit up and take notice.”

Enough for it to be 43rd time elected?