The People’s Vote campaign can stop pretending now. For months they’ve peddled the fiction that their role was to secure a second referendum. But last week the charade was finally exposed. Their aim is not to deliver a People’s Vote. It’s to shore up Jeremy Corbyn’s vote, and deliver him the keys to Downing Street.
‘They’ve been hijacked by Labour,’ a senior Remain-supporting MP explained to me. ‘The campaign is now being used as a tool to save the Labour Party.’
A very blunt tool. Last Thursday, agreement had been reached between the main English Remain parties – Change UK, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens – to run a joint candidate in the Peterborough by-election. The person selected was prominent People’s Vote activist Femi Oluwole.
Like everything to do with Brexit, the reasons for this appeasement are complex. Part of it is base tribalism. Campbell (centre) and Baldwin have huge influence over the campaign, and are proud members of the ‘Labour till I die’ camp
Then, a couple of hours before the pact was due to be announced, Oluwole pulled out. ‘Femi was put under relentless pressure by senior Labour supporters in the campaign,’ an MP explained. ‘He was told he risked letting in Nigel Farage, undermining the chances of delivering a second referendum and even that there would be legal problems.’
Asked specifically if he had been placed under heavy manners by former Labour spin doctors Alastair Campbell and Tom Baldwin to withdraw, Oluwole gave the rather oblique reply ‘not really’. Labour responded by calling the allegation ‘bizarre’.
There is certainly something bizarre about the Peterborough debacle. Those who claim to be campaigning for a second referendum stepped in to block a second referendum candidate from winning the seat.
They did so to protect the seat for Labour, a party that steadfastly refuses to support a second referendum. And they did it under the pretext of stopping Farage’s ‘divisive’ Brexit Party.
Boris Johnson has been facing criticism for his proposed boycott of the Tories’ Euro election campaign.
But I understand he’s going to make up for it with a series of high-profile appearances in the Peterborough by-election.
‘It would have been ridiculous for him to be out there banging the drum in the Euros when even the PM is keeping her head down,’ a Johnson ally tells me, ‘but he’s going to be doing a lot of work up in Peterborough.
Because of May, it’s an uphill struggle, but that won’t stop him getting out there and fighting for the party.’ Could the old Bojo magic produce an upset?
Even though the beneficiaries would be a party facing investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Metropolitan Police, and defending a seat left vacant when its sitting MP was jailed and recalled by her electors for perverting the course of justice.
People’s Vote has protested its innocence. ‘A potential candidate for the Peterborough by-election has decided not to stand for their own reasons,’ said a spokesman.
But the evidence of collaboration with Corbyn is abundant. Take the mysterious People’s Vote Test website – that lets voters check which parties
