Crowdpac, the Steve Hilton backed start-up to crowd fund political campaigns, is shutting down its UK arm today. Having raised only £600,000 since 2014 through the Crowdpac platform, it was losing money. Originally it was non-partisan and the intention was to bring some transparency to political funding.

It switched in 2016 to being a left-wing fundraising platform for Trump-hating Remainers. That might have worked but the management were pretty clueless about marketing and the whole vibe just came over as very US corporate in comparison to Momentum. The crowdfunding sector is very profitable when it works, Crowdpac just never achieved the necessary critical mass…