After a brief period of political turmoil following the fallout of Keir Starmer’s donation mini-scandal, the ultimate civil service insider Sue Gray has resigned from her position as Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister, a fraught end to a year at the top of Labour Party politics. Her resignation comes at a time when despite the UK Government wielding a majority most would kill for, it finds itself facing an incessant run of bad headlines and tumbling polling numbers, some of which can be attributed to external factors, much of it cannot.
While the appointment of Gray received outsized attention in the right-wing press, largely owing to her authoring of the eponymous ‘Sue Gray Report’, even for those sympathetic to the Labour Party the decision to hire her did ring slightly odd from a Leadership that staked much of its credibility on properness and process. As this writer noted previously, it may be slightly naïve but it does feel wrong to run the country as a politically neutral civil servant, and then immediately become political staff for the Leader of the Opposition even if all the rules were followed. And that was before even considering if the civil service and the Labour Party, their competing incentive structures, cultures and requirements, would make Gray a suitable fit. Given that we are not even 100 days into the new Labour Government and she’s handed in her notice, it would seem that we have the answer to that question.
For all the time and energy that went into putting Gray in post and then defending that position, it’s harder still to gauge what the ultimate output was for the Leadership as a result. Political indecision, haphazard communications and a doctrinal lack of bravery graduated from bugs to full-blown features of Starmer’s operation under her tenure. To the point where it became very easy to predict that the donation story would fester into a full-blown crisis as neither Starmer nor Gray could disentangle the fact that just because something was within the rules, doesn’t therefore make it acceptable in the eyes of the public. If you’ve staked part of your credibility on being whiter than white, stories of donors spending thousands of pounds on the clothes on the Prime Minister’s back naturally become very interesting.
One of the more illuminating tales from this period has been that newly-appointed Special Advisers have been taking significant pay cuts to enter Government from Opposition. Given that this decision is within the gift of the Chief of Staff to make (and one that has resulted in SPADS unionising), combined with fairly-well corroborated stories of micromanagement, it is not hard to see why Gray didn’t have a base of support to act as a counterweight to the hostile briefings she’s received. It’s hard to discern the rationale to this decision beyond a sort of short-sighted pit-boss managerialism and any notion that it’s because they were alive to accusations of sleaze has been swiftly disproven by the sorry mess of how the donations story was handled.
However, across the Scottish and Welsh Labour Parties, Gray remains relatively well-liked after her tenure secured a marked improvement in relations between the Party in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff Bay which had previously been fractured. That her new role is a bizarrely-titled ‘envoy’ to the nations and regions is likely indicative that her work there is still viewed as positive and valuable. But even with the Scottish and Welsh Parliament elections drawing nearer on the horizon, that’s a poor haul to salvage from what should have been a crucial first three months in Government.
While Gray is part of this tale, what this ultimately reveals are truths about the principal, how Starmer’s lack of political instincts have created organisational strife in the heart of a Number 10 machine which was already infamous for its inherent dysfunction. That Starmer either didn’t register that this could be an issue, or that he perceived Gray as part of a potential solution highlights his own narrow field of view. That the Government grid was ever near the desk of a Chief of Staff who didn’t have particular experience with the media is alarming and probably goes part of the way to explaining why the first few weeks of this Labour Government have felt so scattergun and loose. But why a Prime Minister elected on a staggering change mandate opted to spend the summer depressing the public, instead of repeatedly highlighting that his Government has brought an end to years of industrial unrest is for cleverer men with shinier suits than me to figure out. Only so much can be blamed on staff.
From the outside it’s hard to properly ascertain the truths from the half-truths and conspiracy, what can be fairly blamed on rotten systems and what can be attributed to the hostile briefings of staff who cut their teeth in Labour’s foreverwar – the eventual histories of Starmer’s Government will prove authoritative on the matter and perhaps Gray’s virtues will become clearer. While some have incorrectly labelled him as the political equivalent of Forrest Gump without agency or capacity of his own, whether this is remembered as a moment of course correction for the new Labour Government or the inciting incident for old habits and worse instincts to assert themselves, is ultimately only up to Starmer.