This week, Boris Johnson breaks his “die in a ditch” pledge to leave the EU on Thursday, and parliament is voting on whether to hold a general election. It is, then, next-level strategic genius to choose this moment to implode the People’s Vote campaign. Roland Rudd, who when he’s not doing PR for financial firms moonlights as chairman of Open Britain – one of the organisations that makes up People’s Vote – has led moves to sack the campaign’s director, James McGrory, and its head of communications, ex-Labour adviser Tom Baldwin. Blood is being spilt, and very publicly: staff have staged a mass walkout, Rudd’s faction is threatening to prosecute McGrory and Baldwin for trespassing, and both sides are fighting it out on Sky News while claiming everything is fine.
Here is a salutary lesson that should have been heeded long ago. During the referendum, the official remain outfit – Britain Stronger In Europe – waged a corporate-backed campaign that lacked any appeal to the electorate. To borrow an expression, they brought a calculator to a knife fight. They could have learned from this lesson. They clearly have not.
If you wanted a personification of everything people resent about the establishment, Rudd is not a bad person to start with. A multimillionaire who has been repeatedly voted as one of Britain’s most influential financial PR executives, he is also the brother of Tory politician Amber Rudd and is deeply embedded in the country’s elite networks. Peter Mandelson is godfather to one of his children and he was an unofficial adviser to Tony Blair, whose son did work experience at Rudd’s firm while he was prime minister.
And herein lies the problem that has bedevilled the People’s Vote campaign from the start: for some of the campaign’s protagonists this has always been about winning back power. There have, of course, always been passionate remainers who genuinely believe Brexit is a terrible self-inflicted disaster that will make their country poorer. And there are others who might also believe this, but who certainly did see remain as a useful means of undermining the Labour leadership and driving a wedge between it and its members and voters. One People’s Vote insider tells me “there was a real Labour-hating atmosphere” at the start, and that Baldwin’s arrival in the summer of 2018 made a difference in challenging that. “When some of us pointed out, ‘You’re not going to win this without Labour,’” they tell me, “the answer was always, ‘You would say that, you’re a Labour supporter.’”
In part, People’s Vote became a refuge and a means to regain relevance for those exiled from frontline politics by Jeremy Corbyn’s assumption of the Labour leadership. The picture painted to me by insiders is one of huge egos with no accountability.
“There’s an unaccountable elite in this country who exert influence which is totally disproportionate to [their] talent, because they have the funds and connections,” is how the ardent remain campaigner and Momentum national organiser Laura Parker puts it to me. For many of this faction, remain was a convenient means of promoting a political realignment that would displace Labour as the main opposition party.
In an increasingly likely December election, they would like to use the People’s Vote apparatus principally to aid the efforts of the Liberal Democrats who – ironically – have abandoned a second referendum in favour of revoking article 50. Another suspicion put to me is that choosing such a critical week to defenestrate the People’s Vote leadership is about abandoning the cause of stopping Brexit in favour of a “rejoin” campaign once Britain has left. This would be the clearest case yet of some using the campaign as a political entity that is less about democracy (a final say now we know more about the nature of Brexit) and more as a vehicle for centrism now the Labour party has been lost to Corbyn.
Hundreds of thousands have sacrificed their free time to march and campaign against Brexit. People’s Vote has many dedicated staff who truly believe in their cause. Of course, Labour still has a case to answer: it should have pivoted earlier than it did to back a new referendum. But Britain’s remainers have been ill-served by self-interested, elite power players who always had other motives. They have helped crater Labour’s support, contributing to a division in the anti-Tory vote which may yet hand Johnson the majority he craves, but has not – as you may have noticed – stopped Brexit in its path.
And if Labour forms a government after an election – the only plausible route to the referendum the People’s Vote campaign exists to promote – and if this faction is central to the remain campaign, we might as well skip the hassle and declare defeat in advance.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
