IYDU Attendees

A lot of previous IYDU meetings have been fairly lightly attended, but we have 45 countries at this one. The location and agenda seem to have done the job:

At this meeting are:

Asia-Pacific

Australia, Azerbaijan, Israel, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand

Europe

Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, Ukraine

America

Canada, United States of America

Africa

Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda

Thursday morning saw us at the Lewis Media Centre in Millbank Towers where we had presentations from Stephen Gilbert and George Bridges. Gilbert is a former Director of Campaigning for the Conservative Party and Bridges has just been appointed the Conservative Campaign Director. We had very good sessions on branding, polling, focus groups etc. They have some world class research on voter behaviour etc.

In the afternoon we went down to Parliament where we met in The Gladstone Meeting Room which also serves as the meeting room of the 1922 Committee, which is equivalent to the Conservative Party Caucus. It’s almost as large as our debating chamber, and has a collection of historic paintings around the room. Photos are banned, so even if I had taken photos I couldn’t blog them until I leave the country 🙂

MP Greg Hands talked about effective local campaigning, and then we had reports on the freedom campaigns for Zimbabwe and Belarus.

At some stage this evening – around 9 pm (GMT) I think, I’m being interviewed on 18 Doughty Street TV, along with some colleagues. Should be lots of fun.