Labour has a Sue Gray problem

When leader Keir Starmer appointed the former Whitehall mandarin and Partygate investigator as his chief of staff last year, it was heralded by Labour’s media cheerleaders as a genius hire. Silently and ruthlessly, she would supposedly bring professionalism and civil-service know-how to a party nearly 15 years out of government.

It’s not exactly going as planned. Since Starmer took up lodgings at No10 in July, this celebrated behind-the-scenes fixer, this supposed bringer of order and bureaucratic efficiency, has instead become the subject of countless damaging leaks and less-than-flattering news reports.

In recent weeks, it has been claimed that she has blocked senior officials from having access to the PM, even over security briefings. That she had a direct, cronyistic hand in the appointment of Labour supporters to senior civil-service positions. That she tried to push through a multi-million bailout of Casement Park, a derelict stadium in Belfast, over the heads of ministers. There have even been stories suggesting she has been surreptitiously moving the desk of Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s policy guru, ever further away from the prime minister’s office, as part of her effort to regulate access to Starmer.

To cap it off, this week the BBC reported that Gray has been given a salary of £170,000. The size of the salary is less of a problem in itself than the fact it is £3,000 more than Starmer earns, and he is actually meant to be running the country. As a source rather pointedly told the BBC’s political editor, Chris Mason: ‘It was suggested that she might want to go for a few thousand pounds less than the prime minister to avoid this very story. She declined.’

Blocking access to the PM. Seeking to monopolise influence over Starmer. Defiantly taking home a paycheck in excess of that of the prime minister. Individually, these stories seem relatively insignificant, petty even – especially as the main source is said to be Labour special advisers, disappointed by their own lower-than-expected salaries. But taken together, they paint a portrait of someone who may have grown a little too big for her boots. Indeed, of an unelected and unaccountable adviser wielding too much power and influence. The infamous words of former Tory minister Oliver Letwin, uttered over a decade ago when Gray was director-general of Whitehall’s propriety and ethics team, no longer quite seem so tongue-in-cheek: ‘Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray… Unless she agrees, things just don’t happen.’

Gray’s ascendancy under Starmer shouldn’t surprise us. As the ‘bureaucrat’s bureaucrat’, to use the words of one Whitehall veteran, Gray is all about ‘rules’, ‘delivery’ and ‘process’. Her language is not politics. It’s the jargon of project management. She’s the personification of the ‘process-driven’ civil-service blob. As such, she is more simpatico with Starmer’s miserably technocratic instincts than just about anyone else. No wonder her desk now sits so close to the PM’s office.

That an unaccountable apparatchik should have risen so high under Labour also makes perfect sense. After all, it was Labour itself that deliberately empowered chiefs of staff and senior advisers. In 1997, Tony Blair pushed through a special ‘order of the council’ law to give Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, authority over top civil servants. Gray’s current prominence is therefore entirely in keeping with New Labour’s tradition of concentrating power in and around the PM and his team of advisers, to the detriment of parliament.

What is shocking, however, is the sheer brassneck of Labour and its cheerleaders’ response to the criticism of Gray’s role. Starmer et al have condemned what they call an entirely ‘misplaced, grossly unfair and deeply personal campaign’ against Gray. Centrist bores have dismissed the coverage of Gray as ‘unimportant process stories’ – trivial and of significance, no doubt, only to right-wing media desperate to do down poor old Labour.

The hypocrisy is jaw dropping. Do Labour and Starmer not remember their demented obsession with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s key adviser and de facto chief of staff? Long loathed by Britain’s Remainer elites for his role in the Vote Leave campaign, Labour were quick to conjure him up as a Rasputin-like figure, dripping poisonous plans into Johnson’s ear and back-seat driving his government from 2019 onwards.

Britain’s largely leftish media were just as obsessed as Labour was with the supposed power and influence of Cummings. He was doorstepped and harassed by journalists on what seemed like a weekly basis. Broadsheets talked darkly of his animosity towards civil servants. After Cummings’s role in Sajid javid’s resignation (over a spad appointment), the BBC talked of the ‘immense power’ Cummings was wielding in the name of the prime minister. The Guardian concurred: ‘[Cummings] holds a huge amount of power, and accepts none of the responsibilities of transparency, persuasion and, actually, courtesy that go along with that.’

The criticism of Cummings’s role reached its peak during the pandemic in April 2020, when it emerged that he had been present at the meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Both Labour and the media were outraged at his attendance and suggested he could be influencing the advice the scientists were giving the government. Starmer’s Labour called for him to be barred from all future meetings, while the Guardian suggested that Cummings’s SAGE attendance might ‘explain how Britain stumbled into the [Covid] crisis’.

Such was the hysterical focus on Cummings, particularly after he broke lockdown rules to drive to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’, that it was hardly a surprise when he stepped down from his role in November 2020. Not that that stopped Labour brickbats from continuing to head his way. In March 2021, Starmer slammed the payrise that had been given to Cummings in 2020, taking it to about £145,000. A few thousand less than the then PM’s salary, and £25,000 less than that just awarded to Sue Gray.

It’s astounding. Labour and its media champions were hysterically obsessed with Dominic Cummings for the 18-or-so months he was Johnson’s chief adviser. They attacked him for his role in the appointment of special advisers. They attacked him for his attendance at high-level SAGE meetings. And they attacked him for his wage packet. And yet now Sue Gray is under fire for something very similar, from her role in the appointment of Labour staffers to her regulation of high-level security meetings, Labour and pals are effectively telling us to ‘move along, nothing to see here’.

It’s clear that Starmer and his supporters are concerned less about the power exercised by unelected and unaccountable advisers, than they are with who those advisers are. Cummings was a Brexit-supporting technocrat at odds with the political establishment and above all the civil service. Gray, by contrast, is in tune with the establishment. She shares Starmer’s deathless managerial outlook and no doubt his petty authoritarianism, too.

In words Keir Starmer would surely understand, there’s one rule for Labour and another for everyone else.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.