Our second of our series of features on this year’s party awards winners features Mark Jeffery, the winner of the Belinda Eyre-Brook Award given to people who work for our elected representatives.

See the whole party awards segment in the video, and the full submission in support of Mark below.

Mark Jeffery has worked for the Lib Dems or Lib Dem run councils for most of the last 25 years.  He joined the Liberal Party at the age of 13 and in the early ’90’s became an activist in Exeter and served on the Devon & Cornwall Regional Executive during a period of electoral growth.

Mark worked for Lib Dem HQ in the run up to the 1997 General Election jointly running our internal target seat polling operation and working on target seat literature. This was hugely successful and meant that the party could redirect resources to allow us to massively increase the number of Parliamentary seats to 46.

Mark worked in Paliament for a year and then went to work in Liverpool as Head of the Leader’s Office, when Mike Storey and the Lib Dems ran Liverpool City Council. As well as this political advisory role, he managed the Cabinet and Lib Dem Group offices, with 63 councillors – the largest ever Lib Dem council group. Mark was a key member of the Liverpool campaign team, that retained control of the City Council and which acted as an inspiration to other Lib Dem councillors and campaigners in cities.

He worked full-time on many successful Parliamnetary by-elections of the time (eg Oldham East & Saddleworth, Winchester etc) in the central literature team. Mark served for several years on ALDC Standung Committtee during a period of local government growth, going on to be Vice-Chair. During this period he designed up ALDC Election Artwork Packs for local campaigners which helped elect hundreds of Lib Dem councillors. He produced ‘FOCUS on FOCUS’, as well as updating ‘The Campaign Manual’. He produced template literature for the Campaigns Depatment for seats in the 2001 general election.

Mark then went to work as Head of Communications for Lib Dem run Watford Borough Council for 11 years. There he worked with the first ever Lib Dem Elected Mayor – Dorothy Thornhill – to make sure the local media relations were positive, as well as overseeing all council corporate external and internal communications, helping the politician’s message get across to local voters. We have retained the elected morality and control of the council now for many years.

Mark has worked with Portsmouth Lib Dems as our Campaigns Manager and has worked on our campaigns to help take back control of the only upper tier City Council. His expert campaign knowledge has been key to us winning back minority control.