Roland Dacre Rudd (born April 1961)[1] is the founder and chairman of FGS Global (formerly Finsbury), a public relations firm, and holds a variety of other charitable and non-executive posts.
[3][8] At Oxford he was friends with Hugo Dixon with whom he travelled to America to work on Walter Mondale's campaign for the Democratic Party nomination.
[3] After graduating, Rudd worked as a policy coordinator[9] for David Owen and the Social Democratic Party (he was the first SDP president of the Oxford Union).
[16] In April 2023, Rudd helped negotiate a deal with KKR buying a 30% stake in FGS Global that valued the company at about $1.4 billion.
[17][18] In August 2024, Rudd helped negotiate a deal for KKR to buy WPP's controlling stake in FGS Global that valued the company at about $1.7 billion.
[7] He subsequently damaged his relationship with many figures in the Labour Party and elsewhere in politics due to his controversial role in the demise of the People's Vote campaign in 2019.
More than 40 staff members walked out in protest at this decision and Rudd's effort to impose Patrick Heneghan as the campaign's interim chief executive.
At a subsequent staff meeting Rudd was criticised as a city PR man who had rarely been seen in the offices and a motion of no confidence in his role was passed by 40 votes to 3.
[36][37] Rudd later resigned as chair of Open Britain but retained control of money and data through a new holding company he had formed for the purpose called Baybridge UK.
[38] In an excoriating article for the Spectator, Alastair Campbell, the former head of strategy and communications in Tony Blair's Downing Street, accused Rudd of putting his personal status ahead of efforts to stop Brexit through a new referendum.