Had it not been for Liverpool offering Easyjet + Ryanair deals with cheap airport fees in the late 1990s along with an airfield big enough to support a B737, I very much doubt Manchester would have seen the need to talk in a significant way to the LCCs at all.
Yes, MAN is where a lot of the people are and the money is, but it needed LPL and LBA to unlock the LCC wave before MAN wanted to get involved. In 1995, LPL was little more than a token airport - it took a risk that MAN did not want and it paid off
For that alone, one should give credit to the management of LPL.