How a PR guru hijacked the People’s Vote campaign

I have enough self-awareness to know that the public are unlikely to care too much about a spat between a multi-millionaire ‘PR guru’ and what someone called a cabal of washed-up spin doctors. But I also know that millions and millions care about Brexit, and the fight for a Final Say referendum — which is why the spat matters.

The multi-millionaire ‘PR guru’ is Finsbury boss Roland Rudd, brother of the former cabinet minister Amber. The has-been spin doctors are me and Peter Mandelson, Tom Baldwin, who was a press adviser to Ed Miliband, and James McGrory, who did likewise for Nick Clegg.

If you have never heard of McGrory and Baldwin, you have almost certainly heard of the People’s Vote campaign, and as campaign director and communications director respectively, they deserve a lot of the credit for that. The People’s Vote has gone from a standing start to being central in the political debate in a couple of years. When we started out — I say ‘we’ because since the referendum I have devoted well over half my time to the anti-Brexit cause (unpaid, if you’re asking) — you could fit the MPs openly supporting us in the back of a cab. At the recent march in London we were turning MPs away, and we were within touching distance of a parliamentary majority when the election was called.

That march was one of many we have done, and two of them are among the three biggest marches of modern times. Again, the People’s Vote team headed by McGrory and Baldwin can take a lot of the credit for that. Not that they want it or ever asked for it. Unlike Rudd, they strike me as having understood the concept of teamship. (As summed up by a quote that has been on my desk since my time in Downing Street: ‘It is amazing what a small group can accomplish provided nobody cares who gets the credit’ — Harry S.