Martin Tod

Martin lives and works in the heart of Winchester with his wife Michaela.

He joined the Liberal party in 1983 at Cambridge University, where he was head of the Liberal/SDP Alliance student campaign team, Deputy President of the Cambridge University Students Union and President of the Union debating society.

Our biggest victory in the students union at the time was the campaign to stop tuition fees. I didn’t think I’d still be campaigning against them 22 years later.

At his Presidential debate, he successfully argued alongside Jim Wallace MP and Richard Wainwright MP ‘That Britain needs a new electoral system’, overcoming the combined efforts of Michael Howard MP, Teddy Taylor MP and Leon Brittan MP. He also represented Cambridge in the World Debating Championships.

Martin worked for 14 years for Procter & Gamble in marketing, living in the UK, Austria - where he met his wife Michaela, Germany, and the Czech Republic before returning to the UK as a Marketing Director in 1998, specialising in Central & Eastern Europe.

All my years living in Europe have made me a convinced supporter of the European ideal. Although just as I believe in reforming local and national government in the UK, I’d like the EU to do much more to open up and be accountable to local citizens.

In 2002, he joined Vodafone as UK Head of Brand & Advertising. His work there won awards in Cannes and London for creativity and in Barcelona for ‘the best mobile marketing campaign in the world’ for 2005. He left last year and is currently an independent marketing and strategy consultant.

In 2003, he served on the Liberal Democrats’ Federal Executive - speaking and voting in favour of committing the party to joining the Iraq war demonstration in Feb. 2003.

It was probably the best possible time to be on the Federal Executive. Being on a demonstration with one million other people and so many thousands of other Lib Dem party members for such an important cause was a great experience.

Martin’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Garnier, was Dean of Winchester and features in Winchester Museum as an ‘anti-muckabite’ campaigner to bring a sewerage system to Winchester in the 1860s. He was a friend of Palmerston, and is the ‘Dean Garnier’ of both the eponymous garden in the Cathedral close, and Garnier Road, leading past the old pumping station.

Outside the Liberal Democrats, Martin is a member of the Electoral Reform Society, the Howard League for Penal Reform, the European Movement, Amnesty International, the Open Rights Group, Friends of the Earth and No2ID.

If you want to know more about Martin Tod, why not ask him a question? All questions asked online will be answered online unless you would like the answer to be confidential. You can also go direct to answers to questions asked earlier.