RAY MALLON is a picture in purple – the colour of his inch-wide trademark braces matching the thin pinstripe in his suit which mirrors the swirl on his paisley patterned tie.

“The greatest compliment anyone ever paid me was Gary Gill, the former footballer,” he purrs. “He said that in the next life me and him are going to be cats because cats are streetwise.”

He laughs, throwing his head back at the thought of the former Middlesbrough and Darlington midfielder’s words, but checking with his fingers that his snowy white hair is still perfectly in place.

“And I said straightaway: ‘Can I be top cat?’”

After 13 years as top cat as Middlesbrough’s directly elected mayor and the Tees Valley’s loudest voice, Mr Mallon last week retired.

He won three elections with more than 50 per cent of the popular vote, and his father, Joe, tried to persuade him to stand for a fourth.

“He’s been a funeral director for 53 years, and he’s organised hundreds of funerals for people who knew they were dying,” says the son. “I asked him ‘did one of them say that they wished they’d worked harder and longer’, and he said: ‘No. Most wished they’d spent more time with their family, gone on more holidays, done more of the things they wanted to do’."

Ray Mallon is 60 next month. He’s a grandfather of two young girls. His decision to stand down coincided with the death of his mother and the births of the girls. A former water polo international, he found himself in the swimming pool passing on his love to them: “I knew then that that was where I wanted to be.”

Is it conceivable, though, that after 20 years at the top of the litter tray, he will simply curl up in a ball next to the radiator?

He came to prominence in the mid-1990s as a policeman, cutting crime in Hartlepool with his no-nonsense “here and now” approach, which owed much to New York’s zero tolerance strategy. So successful was he that he earned the nickname “Robocop” and on the eve of the 1997 election, Labour’s Tony Blair and the Conservatives’ Michael Howard vied with one another to stand next to him in Middlesbrough for the ultimate polling day photograph, with Prime Suspect actress Helen Mirren as the star-studded backdrop.

Months later, the fall. He was suspended from Cleveland Police as part of the Operation Lancet corruption inquiry, and he was denounced by his own chief constable for heading “an empire of evil”. But four years of hugely expensive investigation found nothing, and in 2002 public popularity carried him into Middlesbrough’s imposing Gothic town hall as mayor.

“I will work with people who I like and respect if I like their agenda,” he says of his post-mayoral future. “That strikes a lot out, although I like and respect Steve Gibson (the chemical transport businessman who owns Middlesbrough Football Club) and I like the agenda of his foundation which deals with social deprivation.”Mr Mallon is joining the foundation’s board, unpaid.

But elected mayors are the flavour of the moment with the Chancellor, George Osborne, who wants to devolve powers and money to city regions which are controlled by them. Perhaps Mr Mallon’s 13 years controlling Middlesbrough show why - his personally powerful position gave him a higher platform than that occupied by the four conventional leaders of the other Tees Valley councils.

“It’s not enough just to be a council leader, who is elected by other councillors rather than the public,” says Mr Mallon. “The elected mayor has got to have a personality and bring something to the field of play.”

In 2010, Mr Mallon played a leading role in urging the Tees Valley to forge a path away from the rest of the North-East and create its own Local Economic Partnership. Now he regards Mr Osborne’s plan for a sub-regional mayor to take charge of that body, and more besides, as “a model with merit”.

“The government should just give us the money and then we would decide how much we would spend on transport, regeneration, skills and employment issues,” he says. “The mayor would have command of those three things – basically the local economy.”

Then the conversation takes a surprising twist. “And I would like to see powers taken from the NHS and given to the mayor, because the NHS is too bureaucratic and its decision-making is too slow,” he says.

“The biggest single challenge facing the country at the moment beyond terrorism is the NHS. There’s too much demand. We have to reduce it. We cannot go on building more hospitals, training more doctors and nurses.”

He speaks of the NHS in the way he spoke of the police 15 years ago.

“The NHS absorbs money like a sponge absorbs water,” he says. “We need a turnaround strategy.” As a starting point, he suggests spending ten per cent of the NHS budget on reducing demand, on tackling the social issues that prompt people to pile into A&E. Waiting lists, he agrees, would go up in the short term, but in the long term...

“We’ve got to reduce the number of people going through the door.”

Which is all a little contradictory. He’s given it all up to spend more time with his family only to talk of the merits of an even greater role.

“The mayor will take a couple of years to go ahead, so I don’t think I would go for it because I would be 62 or 63,” he says, “but I can’t discount it.

“I’m going to take a leaf out of James Bond’s book – Never Say Never Again, although I’m not as good looking as him.”

Could there be a comeback for the cat in purple?