City MP Gisela Stuart is to be handed the top job in the Vote Leave group campaigning for a Brexit .
Edgbaston Labour MP Ms Stuart has become one of the most prominent advocates of a departure from the European Union after being unconvinced by the deal struck by Prime Minister David Cameron.
She will chair the board of Vote Leave while Michael Gove, the Justice Secretary, will chair the campaigning committee.
She will replace the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson as chair of Vote Leave, in a matter of days, according to ITV's Robert Peston.
This comes days after Ms Stuart accused her own party of a failure to face up to the realities of the European project .
She said: “Something really curious has happened, and that is, ever since Maastricht, when we on the Labour side looked at the Tories tearing themselves apart over Europe, I think we have stopped thinking about what the European Union really means.”
Vote Leave will hope the combination of leading Tory and Labour figures at its head will persuade the Electoral Commission that it is broadly enough based to become the official Leave campaign.
It is battling for the designation with Grassroots Out, which has the backing of UKIP and some well-known populist politicians, such as George Galloway.
Speaking to Today last week, Ms Stuart said the European project was causing the Greek government to sell out a generation of young workers in a bid to save the euro.
And she dismissed claims that the EU had helped keep the peace in Europe as a “rather curious reading of history”, saying the political stability it had helped to create is now being “seriously questioned”.
She said: “France and Germany coming together within the envelope of Nato and the collective security – that is what has kept the peace.
“What the European Union, up to a certain point, provided for was a political stability within a defence framework.
“But if you are looking at what is happening across the European Union now - and the refugee crisis is just the latest demonstration – that political stability is being seriously questioned, and the European Union as an institution is not responding to it properly.”
