How People's Vote collapsed after Roland Rudd's boardroom coup

The plan was for People’s Vote to become one of the most influential voices in the election campaign. But an extraordinary three-week-long row pitting some of Labour’s best known names against a multimillionaire PR specialist has led to the total collapse of the second referendum pressure group.

With over 500,000 supporters, and two successful mass marches in London behind it, the group was raising £100,000 a week in small donations and planned to run a tactical vote campaign in 100 seats in support of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and a few former Conservatives, such as Dominic Grieve and David Gauke.

Alastair Campbell, who had been closely involved in the campaign, said: “This has become an absolute joke. We had a big platform, ready to go, and we were taken off the field. We could have been a bridge between Labour and the Lib Dems, and the organisation is nowhere.”

After months of simmering tensions, a boardroom coup saw chairman Roland Rudd, the brother of former Conservative minister Amber Rudd, dismiss its two leading staffers – director James McGrory, a former aide to Nick Clegg, and communications director Tom Baldwin, a former adviser to Ed Miliband – via an email sent at 9pm on the Sunday before the election was called.

Related: Staff bid to hit Roland Rudd 'in the wallet' in People's Vote dispute

The organisation’s 40 staff all walked out in support, and three weeks on the dispute is no closer to resolution, even though Rudd resigned as chairman at the end of last week. A few replacements have been donating money to some election candidates, but as a force, the most powerful pressure group in British politics appears all but dead.

Exiled staff have been based at Church House, Westminster, and the Grosvenor pub in Pimlico, down the road from People’s Vote headquarters in Millbank Tower. Some hope to launch a rival slimmed-down campaign shortly targeting 30 seats and fronted by former MPs including Tom Watson.

Meanwhile, although Rudd’s reputation has been severely dented, allies of his are in charge of the organisation and its valuable data. “The reality is that the organisation was not professionally run, and if a second referendum was ever called would struggle to be designated the official remain group,” one friend of Rudd’s said.

Even those involved struggle to articulate any clear reason for the dispute, which in large part appears to revolve around a clash of personalities. Campbell accuses Rudd of wanting “to have status at west London dinner parties”, while friends of Rudd say “Campbell and Peter Mandelson don’t want to pivot the organisation to a pro-remain position”. Like Campbell, Mandelson has fallen out with Rudd.

It is a far cry from the pressure group that organised two mass demonstrations in London in March and October, with a turnout of hundreds of thousands. “We were able to get politicians from a Tory like Heseltine to Labour’s John McDonnell on one platform. Who else has managed to do that?” said one exasperated campaign organiser.

The first public event had been in April 2018, at Camden’s Electric Ballroom, where a small cross-party group of MPs – including Anna Soubry, then a Conservative, Chuka Umunna, then Labour, and Green MP Caroline Lucas, fronted an event with the help of celebrity supporters such as actor Sir Patrick Stewart.

It was at first thought that Soubry and Umunna had wanted to use the group as a platform to form a new party, but they were rebuffed, complaining that they were not getting enough media appearances, as more MPs gradually came on board. Soubry and Umunna went on to become involved in forming the short-lived Change UK breakaway party earlier this year.

Parliamentary support rose from 30 MPs in 2018. In April’s round of indicative votes, 280 MPs voted for a second referendum – although 292 voted against. There was a brief period of hope, even, that if Boris Johnson had been unable to renegotiate a Brexit deal in October, parliament might finally vote for a referendum to break the deadlock. “I thought we might get it to avoid a no-deal,” Baldwin said.

But Johnson succeeded, leaving the campaign pinning its final hopes on a Labour victory in December, given the opposition party’s policy of offering voters a final say on another new Brexit deal – until Rudd launched what even some supporters concede was a spectacularly ill-timed boardroom coup.

People’s Vote was made up of a patchwork of nine different organisations, the largest of which was Open Britain, the successor to the failed StrongerIn pro-European Union campaign from 2016. “Rudd appointed himself as chairman of People’s Vote, and although it was a bit odd, we didn’t really think that much of it,” Campbell said.

What Rudd did was seize control of Open Britain, which employed the majority of the staff working at Millbank Tower and controlled its data, via a company called Baybridge. People who might have been supportive of McGrory and Baldwin were removed from its board, and the financial PR specialist, who founded corporate communications firm Finsbury, was and remains in ultimate control.

Gavin Esler, the former Newsnight presenter, who had become a People’s Vote campaigner, called on supporters to urge Rudd to completely disengage in a last-ditch open letter. “The People’s Vote campaign is not like the Brexit party – a limited company at the whim of one individual,” Esler writes, although his optimistic sentiment appears not to have been borne out by reality.