Yesterday was London Region’s autumn conference, during which I heard from two recent converts to Twitter.
First, Keith House – leader of Eastleigh Council and probably the person with the best record of election results at both local and national level year in, year out in any council run by the Liberal Democrats.* Perhaps understandably given his record of electoral success, he hasn’t been chomping at the bit to innovate online – but even Keith has now seen the benefits Twitter can bring and joined himself.
Keith highlighted how much greater the role of the internet would be at the next general election compared with the past – and the importance of not being left behind as people’s behaviour changes.
Second, Chris Nicholson, the Liberal Democrat prospective candidate for Streatham. Like Keith, Chris is not from the digitally native generation and Chris has been doing a fantastic job building up the campaign organisation and team in Streatham. Again, understandably, Twitter hasn’t been at the top of his list of priorities. But he recounted how recently he went canvassing and met a floating voter. She explained that she didn’t really follow politics in the media – but she did follow Nick Clegg and Bridget Fox on Twitter and was impressed with them both. Chris too is now on Twitter.
Finally, congratulations to Jonathan Fryer on his election as London Region chair. With Jonathan Davies also recently elected chair of the English Party, it is clearly the season to be called Jonathan.
* It’s a close run thing between Keith and a couple of other areas. I’ll leave it to others to argue in the comments how they’ve done even better 🙂
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One Comment
This conference was crammed with useful campaigning zeal, ideas and skills on how to win in the coming elections for Liberal Democrats.
I liked the bit that told us how high Nick Clegg`s national popularity had now grown over 2 years..His much higher esteem from voter ID is due to the tough Gurkha’s campaign and on the `Expenses Scandal’ and `Soldiers Pay etc.’ but the top issue on voters` minds is in fact the NHS and 51% of voters still have not made their minds up-so there is all to play for!
Cllr Keith House Eastleigh told us `winning an election is like a military campaign’-decide on strategy first.
I was privileged to hear Paddy Ashdown make an excellent speech, last week,at the very successful Brent Annual Dinner, when he said there were four main problems facing Britain,two at home and two abroad, namely `Credit Crunch’ and `MP`s Expenses and cleaning up parliament ‘ and `Afghanistan’ and the EU.