What happens to the People's Vote brigade now?
Photo by Ollie Millington/Getty Images
The noises coming out of the Peoples Vote campaign are confusing, and appear to be about personality as much as anything else. The worst outfit in the world to run is a non-for-profit campaigning organisation with more than five employees but fewer than 50.
People’s Vote, with its precious title, emerged after the 2017 election plunged Britain into its continuing crisis of ungovernabilty. PV – as its fans call it – has always been caught between its party political origins. Its director, James McGrory, is a former Nick Clegg advisor, and the Lib Dems have tried to used the PV campaign as a way back to support after the disaster of five years of being David Cameron’s poodle.
The other chief animator is the pugnacious, often brilliant ex-Times journalist, Tom Baldwin, who worked for Ed Miliband. He and other Labour pro-Europeans, like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, have no time for Jeremy Corbyn, but do believe that the progressive vote in Britain is pro-European and Labour should align with it.
Hovering near it all has been Roland Rudd, brother of Amber, member of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival board and City PR extraordinaire.
PV has failed in its declared aim of winning Parliamentary endorsement for a new referendum (even though figures like Dominic Cummings and Nigel Farage both said before June 2016 that a second confirmatory vote would be needed).
But PV has twice put a million people on to streets of London – the biggest, peaceful, assemblies of middle England ever in the nation’s history. It has helped make the Lib Dems and SNP into pro-referendum parties and helped push the Labour Party in that direction, though not taking all Labour MPs along.
What it has failed to do is to move dial in Tory Party, and because PV grandees are too associated with the Blair legacy to have any traction in current Labour leadership circles, it has had little impact there. Jeremy Corbyn still clings to his 1975 Bennite position. Others, like John McDonnell, and Diane Abbott, have been forced into being warmer about a People’s Vote as they watch so many young voters go Lib Dib and Green. But when you have a party leader who won’t budge, the party can’t move.
The Remain campaign, with its appointment of the useless Marks and Spencer boss, Lord Rose, and its obsession with Lord Heseltine, Tony Blair, and John Major, is redolent of several days before yesterday.
It is amazing that when every opinion poll shows over half the country now against Brexit and wanting a new vote, there is no new voice or face to speak for that half of Britain.
After fatuous headlines last week that President Macron was going to rush to Boris Johnson’s help by refusing an extension of EU membership into 2020, it is clear that the EU27 see Brexit as an internal British question, and if we want to keep stewing in our own juice, so be it.
A general election, whatever Johnson, Corbyn, Swinson and Sturgeon may proclaim, is unlikely to resolve the problem. A solid block of SNP MPs make a strong majority for Johnson or Corbyn more than unlikely, meaning another non-majority Parliament.
Then perhaps the penny will drop that the only way to cut the Gordian knot is to ask the people. The paradox is that would once have been a Tory slogan: indeed it was Benjamin Disraeli – surely the Tory leader closest to Boris Johnson – who coined “Trust the People” as a slogan.
The prime minister likes to surprise. He is already stealing Labour’s spending policies as he buries austerity Britain. Will Johnson copy Disraeli – who famously said he “caught the Whigs bathing and walked off with the clothes” – by proclaiming he will trust the people and let them decide our future? Farage would go bonkers. Sir Bill Cash would collapse. The new owners of the Daily Telegraph would not know which way to turn. But most time-serving cabinet ministers will stay. The Lib Dem fox will be shot. Pro-Brexit Corbyn will be impaled on his fence. And Tory MPs who want a Tory government that can get things done may decide that power is worth putting to rest the anti-European obsessions of this century so far.
