Mike Wolfe was the first directly elected mayor of Stoke-on-Trent

Stoke-on-Trent

Stoke-on-Trent , also called The Potteries is a city in Staffordshire, England, which forms a linear conurbation almost 12 miles long, with an area of . Together with the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme Stoke forms The Potteries Urban Area...

, sitting in office from 2002 to 2005.

Time as Mayor

Wolfe left the Labour Party

Labour Party (UK)

The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...

 to stand as an independent in the mayoral race of October 2002 and narrowly beat George Stevenson, a local Labour member of Parliament

Member of Parliament

A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

. Both Wolfe and his successor Mark Meredith

Mark Meredith

Mark Joseph Meredith was the second and last directly elected mayor of Stoke-on-Trent in England. An openly gay man and former amateur boxer he was elected on 5 May 2005, for the Labour Party, and defeated incumbent independent Mike Wolfe. In March 2009, Meredith was arrested on suspicion of...

 are openly gay.

Wolfe came fourth out of eight in his bid for re-election in May 2005 when Labour gained the position of elected mayor. The election was notable for a record number of spoiled ballot papers.

Post-2005

He later became a columnist for local paper, The Sentinel.