The Rat behind Remain
Meet the City spinmeister orchestrating the insidious plot to reverse the will of the people on Brexit
WITHIN minutes of the secret meeting of Brexit saboteurs in Smith Square finishing on Wednesday, Roland Rudd, the shadowy multi-millionaire spin doctor behind the campaign to derail Brexit, was in receipt of a full report.
In his open-plan office on the 13th floor of the iconic Adelphi Building, with its panoramic views of Westminster, the man dubbed the ‘godfather of Remain’ was on the phone, demanding that every cough and spit be relayed to him. Increasingly, he believes he scents victory.
Rudd, an oleaginous charmer with just a hint of the spiv, is the boss of a City PR firm and a lifelong EU fanatic who set up the pressure group open Britain immediately after the EU referendum in June 2016.
It would, he promised, lead the fightback to stay in Europe, to keep Britain in the single market and customs union, and to ensure free movement of people continues. The first page of the open Britain website makes its intent clear.
‘As the Brexit process continues, facts are starting to come to light which no one could have known at the time of the referendum. The architect of Article 50, Lord Kerr, confirmed that Brexit is reversible if people change their minds,’ it says.
In an attempt to concentrate firepower, Rudd has now moved eight other anti-Brexit organisations into the open Britain war room based at Millbank Tower, a few hundred yards from Parliament.
They include Best For Britain; European Movement UK; Scientists For EU; Healthier IN the EU; Britain For Europe; and The New European newspaper.
It is, however, open Britain that is the unofficial cabal of Labour MPs, Tory rebels, peers of all parties, City folk, aides and fellow spin doctors whom Rudd has recruited to the cause. Several of them were present at the meeting — exposed in yesterday’s Mail — at the European Commission’s Smith Square HQ in Central London.
Rudd’s researchers provide facts and figures for their speeches and articles and organise their media interviews. He has ploughed many hundreds of thousands of pounds of his £45 million fortune into the venture and mobilised his formidable network of contacts.
There is, of course, a revolving door of visitors to Millbank from Westminster, and the usual suspects include Chuka Umunna, the Labour MP, who makes no secret of his wish to overturn Brexit. Rudd is also close to Tory MP Anna Soubry, who famously almost broke down in tears at a Remain rally after the referendum (and later denied being inebriated) and, of course, former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan and former Attorney General Dominic Grieve.
‘The main opposition to Brexit must come from within Parliament,’ Rudd has insisted.
Rudd’s £23 million home in Kensington is also put to good use, with recent guests including Sir Nick Clegg, the former Lib Dem leader, and former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Earlier this year, the two men shared a platform at anti-Brexit event.
FORMER EU Commissioner Lord Mandelson — who under Tony Blair was sacked twice from the Cabinet — is a friend and ally. Indeed, Mandelson is godfather to of one of Rudd’s three children with his wife, dress designer Sophie Hale.
Sir John Major, the former Tory Prime Minister who made a passionate (for him) plea against Brexit in February, had been in close contact with Rudd’s team beforehand.
open Britain raised £50,000 on the back of that speech.
Turn on BBC and you often hear Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s bully-boy mouthpiece (present in Smith Square this week), attacking Brexit. Chances are the interview was fixed by Rudd’s outfit.
Roland Rudd’s influence on the war on Brexit cannot be overstated, and his team is now focused on organising a mass march from Hyde Park to Westminster later this month to demand a ‘People’s Vote’ on the final terms of the deal negotiated with Brussels. They are putting it about that one million will attend. A People’s Vote is a classic EU tactic — if you can’t get the vote you want in an EU referendum — hold another.
Roland Dacre Rudd, 57, was educated at Millfield School where today he is chairman of the board of governors. His younger sister, Amber, was Home Secretary until she resigned last month over the Windrush scandal.
Their father Tony, a financial journalist turned corporate financier, was criticised by an official inquiry into the 1982 takeover of investment firm Greenbank Trust, a company he owned with his business partners. The report concluded that Rudd and his associate were ‘totally unfit to be directors’.
At the little- known oxford College, Regent’s Park, Roland Rudd studied Philosophy and Theology, and became president of the Union at the third attempt. He started out in journalism at the Financial Times, where he and his great friend Robert Peston, now the political editor of ITV, were known as The Pest and The Rat.
According to a former colleague at that time, they were ‘both tall, dark and ambitious, though the Pest was considered the better journalist, while the Rat (named after the TV character Roland Rat) was the handsome charmer’.
As the City expanded and deregulation offered unprecedented opportunity, Rudd recognised that a new type of financial PR was needed, one in which he and his team operated as counsel and confidante to CEos and high-flyers.
In 1994 he founded Finsbury Group and built on an already extensive network — with his penchant for designer suits, he was known as the ‘ Serpentine schmoozer’ — which he is now exploiting in the anti-Brexit cause.
In 2001, he sold the business to Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP, banking a reputed £45 million in the process. Today, Rudd is chairman of Finsbury, Britain’s largest communications company and the third biggest in the U.S.
He represents more than a quarter of FTSE 100 companies. Last year he paid himself £4.5 million. In addition to his West London home, the family spends weekends at an eight-bedroom Grade I-listed mansion in Somerset.
Rudd’s friendship with Peston has remained intact and on occasion raised a few eyebrows. In 2007, in the run up to the financial crash, Peston who was then the BBC’s new business editor, broke the story about the Northern Rockck bank. Rudd just happened to be handling the bank’s PR.
A year later, Peston picked up the scoop that Lloyds TSB, headed by Sir Victor Blank, was about to step in and rescue its foundering rival, HBoS. There had been fears that a run on the bank could wreck the deal. But Peston’s exclusive saw the HBoS share price rally. Sir Victor’s PR adviser? Roland Rudd.
(Rudd has said previously he’d ‘never leak anything that hadn’t been pre-ordained and discussed [with a client]’ and ‘when people get stories, particularly somebody as good as Robert, he never writes it on the basis of one person’.)
Certainly, Rudd has form for working behind the scenes on the EU. In 2006 he hosted a dinner at his home for Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, and leading businessmen. Blair spoke passionately about the opportunities for Britain with Bulgaria and Romania joining the EU the following year.
on behalf of his business guests, Rudd issued a statement urging the Government to resist Tory calls to limit migrants from the new member- states. It said: ‘ If Bulgaria and Romania join the EU next year, the UK should continue with its open-door policy.
‘A pause in migration would be tantamount to a reversal of policy and could work against Britain.’
No mention was made of Blair being at the dinner nor were any minutes kept — a highly unusual occurrence for a serving PM.
Even now Rudd insists that unlimited immigration is a positive. ‘ The prospect of further migration that triggers economic growth is a cause for celebration, not cowardice,’ he says.
How ironic that he cannot accept a simple truth: that it was the very issue of unfettered migration that was a significant factor for millions in the referendum that delivered a decisive vote for Leave.