Andrew Garnett, 42, stood for the Conservatives in Liverpool Wavertree at the last general election. He won just 7.5 per cent of the vote and came third. He told me Liverpudlians blame the Tories for the city's decline and are not ready to forgive them. "People would take leaflets from me if they were emblazoned with something about the NHS or the police but when they realised it was from the Tories, they'd throw it on the floor in disgust. That was it. Whatever you said next would fall on deaf ears."

The son of a dockworker and grandson of an "ardent trade unionist", Garnett says he realised he was a Conservative in 1985 "when the Labour Party had led the city into a situation where they couldn't even pay their teachers". He joined the Young Conservatives and says he "was thought of as being very odd, very, very strange. It's pretty odd to join a political party generally but there was a social cost to being a teenage Tory in Liverpool in the Eighties."

How can the Tories make electoral inroads in a city where being a Conservative does not just put you in a minority but makes you seem weird? How to make a city trust your party again when, 32 years ago, a Conservative chancellor recommended it be left to "managed decline"?

Tony Caldeira, 43, has decided to look for answers to these questions. The Conservative candidate in Liverpool's 2012 mayoral election, he runs Britain's largest cushion manufacturer, a business he started on a market stall in the city two decades ago. He's an optimist, probably a prerequisite for being Liverpool's foremost Tory. "We're enjoying a mini-revival here," he tells me as we sit in a pub on a road off Church Street, the city's shopping hub, watching Liverpool — Caldeira is "fanatical" about the team — beat Bournemouth in the FA cup. At the last general election, 116,285 Liverpudlians voted Labour and just 19,553 voted Conservative. This, to the outsider, would seem a fairly measly showing.

Caldeira, however, says he was encouraged by the party's performance. He points out that they increased their vote by 50 per cent across Merseyside, albeit from a very low base, and, says Conservative campaign headquarters, are looking to learn from this relative success, "replicating what we have done in other cities". Caldeira came seventh in the mayoral contest with 4.5 per cent of the vote. He blames a strong independent candidate and the timing of the municipal election, in the wake of the politically catastrophic 2012 "pasty-tax" Budget, for this blip.

But the party's modest revival in the city should not be measured simply in terms of ballot-box success. Five years ago, the Conservatives were not even part of the local political debate. The Liverpool Echo — a "very red top" according to Caldeira — didn't bother to ask the party for comment, while debates on BBC Merseyside tended to be between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Now Caldeira appears on local radio regularly. "The mood is much more conciliatory," he says. "People say the guy with the cushions has got a point." Of course, the city's media is consumed not only by city constituents but commuters from more rural seats too. There are nine marginal seats along the Mersey where the Echo is read and BBC Merseyside is listened to. The message for the Conservatives is clear: they cannot hope to do better in the north without re-establishing themselves in cities like Liverpool, whose sphere of influence extends past their borders.