Frank McKenna has never exactly been shy about being the public face of the Downtown in Business brand, which he founded in Liverpool in 2004 and now boasts operations in Preston and Manchester (the latter launched earlier this year). His weekly, “Thank Frank it’s Friday” email missives, “Frankie Says” blog and Tarantino-inspired advertisements are cases in point.
But no-one who has met him could believe he takes it all seriously. Not too seriously, anyway.
His father was a Bootle bus driver and trade unionist who moved his family out to Skelmersdale when Frank was seven years old. And McKenna says it was his father who nurtured his interested in politics from an early age – an interest that saw him become a career politician in the Labour party.
“But I was never, even at an early age, what you might consider to be radical politically,” he tells EN. “I was always fairly centrist and bought right into the New Labour project.”
Having started out as a welfare rights advisor in the mid-1980s, later becoming a community development officer, McKenna was elected to Lancashire County Council in 1989 at the age of 26.
In 1992 he became agent, then parliamentary assistant, for Colin Pickthall, MP for West Lancashire from 1992-2005. And in 1997 he became deputy leader of Lancashire County Council. Then, in 2000, it all came crashing down.
“Myself and a colleague were accused of overspending on an election campaign,” he explains. “There was never a suggestion that any financial gain had been made. However, the charge was ‘electoral fraud’.
“It boiled down to the fact that we were accused of producing too many leaflets in the 1997 election campaign.”
McKenna blames the affair on the old Labour guard trying to undermine his position and points out that when the case went to court following a threeyear investigation the judge threw it out on day one.
During the three-year period between accusation and trial, McKenna says he was unable to continue with any political activity – so he set up as a public affairs consultant.
He says Downtown Liverpool in Business grew out of a service he offered to help businesses connect with Merseyside’s cat’s cradle of agencies and quangos.
It was, he says, seen at that stage as purely a lobbying organisation: “It was never my intention to have a business networking club. It was only through people approaching me and saying, ‘Why don’t you do an event?’ ‘Why don’t you arrange business-to-business introductions?’ And that side of the business evolved, and is now probably 70 per cent of the business.”
From its foundation in 2004 the Downtown brand now has offshoots in Preston and Manchester – and a small presence in Lancaster. McKenna says he has ambitions to move into other northern cities, and that Leeds would be an obvious next step.
But, as the organisation has grown and become dominated by events that rely on sponsorship from the likes of the North West Regional Development Agency, has the “Business Club With Attitude” lost its anti-establishment edge and just become about the cocktails and “Sexy Networking”? How can McKenna successfully lobby his sponsors?
“It’s important to recognise that you don’t do a deal with the devil in that respect,” he replies. “We have never had Steve Broomhead (NWDA chief executive) try to influence any of the policy initiatives or issues that we articulate.
“And if he tried he knows we wouldn’t take any notice. They sponsor us because they can reach businesses they wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach [that’s your one plug –ed].
“As far as lobbying is concerned, you mature and hone your skills. In the first couple of years, and particularly given that we were in a city that was always quite politically fraught, we had to shout quite loudly just to be heard.”
He says Liverpool city council, under Mike Storey, wasn’t exactly supportive at first but that when Warren Bradley took the helm in 2005 relations became much more cordial.
“Warren Bradley approached us and said, ‘Can we have a conversation?’ and from that moment on it’s been a much more mature relationship. But we’re still robust. We probably say the harsher things about council policy and decisions to them directly now, because we can. We don’t have to use the pages of the Echo anymore because we’re part of the inner sanctum, if you like.
“But I hope people don’t have the impression that we’ve gone soft, because we haven’t.”