Keith Wakefield: Former Leeds City Council leader who helped bring Tour de France to Yorkshire

Keith Wakefield, who has died at 78, was twice leader of Leeds City Council and helped bring the Tour de France to Yorkshire.

A councillor for the Barwick and Kippax ward from 1988 to 2004 and then Kippax and Methley ward from 2004 to 2019, he was council leader from 2003 to 2004 and 2010 to 2015.

In his second stint he took charge as the coalition Government cut local authority budgets as part of its austerity programme – a move that led to large numbers of jobs being lost.

Mr Wakefield was a key architect of efforts to get West Yorkshire councils to work more closely together and played a pivotal role in negotiations with the government to devolve powers and funding from Whitehall to the region.

Along with the then council chief executive Tom Riordan, he helped persuade neighbouring councils to back the hosting of the Tour de France Grand Depart in 2014.

Mr Wakefield had a tumultuous start to his life. He was barely a toddler when he was taken into care in a Birmingham orphanage; his single mother, Aileen Mable, was unable to cope after separating from his father.

Keith was eventually fostered at age seven and moved with his new parents to Leicester, but he became alienated from the couple after years of neglect at their hands.

In an interview with The Yorkshire Post just over a decade ago, he described himself as “a bit of a bad lad, who could have gone either way”.

Amid smoking, drinking and playing truant, he left his secondary modern at 14 without any qualifications and fled the unhappy nest shortly after that.

A job stacking shelves and cleaning loos in a Co-op store followed, the start of 11 years as a working man which saw him do everything from engineering to collecting pennies in public toilets.

During his teens there were moments of adventure, including the day he and a mate travelled to Southampton and tried to stow away on the QE2.

During a spell when he was out of work and unable to pay his rent he was forced to spend weeks sleeping rough in a train station. But he was determined not to return to his foster family.

He was never reunited with his biological parents and it was only when he was in his 50s that he discovered he had an older sister and brother, the latter died before they could meet.

He became interested in politics while working at a factory in Leicester, saying: “There was the realisation that it just wasn’t fair. People could sack you on a whim, or change your shifts in an instant and there was no holiday pay for the first year.”

Mr Wakefield had a daughter in his 20s and then after heading to Leeds in his 30s he married twice. His first marriage, to Ruth, produced another daughter, and a son.