David Douglas
One
of the chief organisers of the Hampstead Conservative party and a
key member of Brian Coleman’s election campaign has been forced to
flee the Maldives after unwittingly flying into the middle of a
turbulent change of government.
David Douglas was pulled out
of the islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean by Tory Party HQ on
Tuesday amid fears for his safety.
There have been
unconfirmed reports of beatings in the streets, and pictures
distributed by news agencies on the ground this week showed violent
skirmishes said to have been caused by a police mutiny.
“The
whole thing was just surreal,” Mr Douglas said last night
(Wednesday), back home after spending almost two days on planes.
“It’s only once you get out and look at the internet and see
what’s going on that you realise how scary it could have been.”
As one of the brains behind the Conservative challenge which
helped turn Glenda Jackson’s Hampstead parliamentary seat from a
Labour stronghold to a marginal in 2010, Mr Douglas is part of a
Tory scheme to train would-be politicians in “emerging democracies”
abroad.
He had headed to the Maldives with another
Conservative organiser to show activists from the Maldivian
Democratic Party (MDP) how to leaflet effectively and to retain and
recruit members.
The MDP won the country’s first ever
democratic elections four years ago and has been credited with
improving infrastructure and investing in healthcare.
But as
Mr DougBut as
Mr Douglas was flying to the city of Malé on Tuesday, the MDP’s
president Mohammed Nasheed stepped down – he later claimed he had
been forced to resign.
Mr Douglas last year helped political
organisers in Uganda but is more used to the rather less fiery
battles in Hampstead, where he is helping Mr Coleman’s bid to fend
off the Labour challenge for the Barnet and Camden seat at May’s
London Assembly elections. He was also one of the organisers who
helped former Camden councillor Chris Philp come within a whisker of
unseating Glenda Jackson in 2010 – losing by just 42 votes.
Mr Douglas, whose trip was organised by the Westminster Foundation
for Democracy, said he had lost track of which day was which after
travelling through time zones and being ordered home after just
hours in the Maldives.n my phone and there was a
message which said, ‘there has been a change of government, you need
to leave now’,” he said.
“There were reports of people who
were the equivalent of us who were being beaten. Our safety could
not be guaranteed and at that point it wasn’t a question of when’s
the next cheapest plane, it was get out whatever the cost.”
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