Sue Gray and the future of Downing Street
The prime minister's chief of staff is embattled and the centre of government is looking dysfunctional: I have analysed some of the aspects of what is going on
The past few weeks have been electric with rumour, speculation and commentary about the prime minister’s chief of staff, Sue Gray. That is an observation rather than a criticism of anyone, since I have contributed to it myself, defending her level of remuneration, arguing that she is part of an organism which is showing itself poor at media management and pointing out that the government has stumbled on issues which should have fallen within her particular expertise.
There is no point in ministers maintaining that Gray is not or should not be the focus of media attention. It is a fundamentally mistaken focus when politicians try to tell journalists or the public what they should be talking about, at best ineffective and at worst patronising and insulting. More broadly, I have always believed that Enoch Powell was correct in his observation that “for a politician to complain about the press is like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea”. Effort spent battling that sea is effort wasted.
I am as certain that some of the rumours surrounding Gray and her conduct as Downing Street chief of staff are false and malicious as I am that some of them are entirely true and accurately reported. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is not easy, but that is the journalist’s job, treading a fine line between responsible judgement of what is plausible and avoiding deferential silence simply because something is not written out in triplicate and witnessed by a notary. There are sins of commission and sins of omission, and the best commentators will minimise both as well as putting what they do say in a considered context which allows the audience to reach its own informed conclusions without being unduly influenced.
It is obvious now that stories about Gray and how she fits into the wider picture of the government will not simply go away. Sebastian Payne in The i has already predicted that “it’s now a matter of when, and not if, she will become the first major departure of the Starmer government”, while The Guardian’s Peter Walker agreed yesterday that “Gray may have to go”. Increasingly, I think they are right in the longer term; I would be surprised, certainly, if Gray remains in post by the halfway mark of this parliament, for example. On the other hand, I have seen too many politicians cling stubbornly to colleagues and subordinates well beyond the point of reality and practicality to be confident that she will leave her post imminently, say, by the end of the year.
That so many public rows have erupted either centred on or involving the prime minister’s chief of staff has been interesting for long-experienced Whitehall watchers, because it has brought to the top of the news agenda the institutions of government and the way they work, not usually a subject of much public interest (though absolutely vital to how we are governed). I know I am in a very small minority of people who pore over machinery of government changes savouring every last detail, weighing up changes of ministerial responsibilities and judging the balance of power between departments and between ministers. When there were last significant alterations to the Whitehall landscape, in February 2023, I managed to write three essays on the process, in anticipation, in review and on the implications for parliamentary scrutiny. What can I say? As a Tory I have a respect for institutions, and as a former bureaucrat of sorts I am interested in process.
When Sue Gray resigned from the civil service in May 2023 and it was announced that she would join the leader of the opposition’s office as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff that autumn, there were many who were outraged at what they saw as a senior civil servant revealing party political leanings. The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) raised no formal objection to her accepting the position. Nevertheless, these feelings were particularly intense because Gray had been the author of the 2022 internal investigation into social gatherings on government premises during the Covid-19 lockdown (so-called “Partygate”) which became one of the causes behind Boris Johnson’s resignation as prime minister. Some Conservative MPs questioned her impartiality, and a review within Whitehall did indeed find that there was a prima facie case that Gray had broken the Civil Service Code in her dealings with Starmer over taking up a role in his office.
At the time, I supported Gray’s right to move from the civil service to a party political role, within normal and reasonable limitations. I argued that civil servants could hold political views, even strong ones, but remain duly impartial in their professional lives, and I still think that is absolutely and importantly true. I also see no reason to think that the “Partygate” inquiry was unfair and I do not for a moment think that Boris Johnson was the victim of a plot or a conspiracy, pace Nadine Dorries. Nevertheless, on reflection, I think I was a little too generous towards Gray and a little too deferential towards the best interpretation of events; civil servants must be impartial but they must also be seen to be impartial, and in fact the two things are not always separable. I know from my own time as a parliamentary official that what mattered was MPs’ perception and confidence that I dealt with them all fairly, impartially and equally, irrespective of party or ideology, more than whether in fact I did so (I did).
All of this being said, I want to enter into the record during a slight lull in proceedings a few thoughts about Gray, the Downing Street machine in which she is operating and the role of the chief of staff in general terms, for clarity in my own mind and perhaps for the interest of readers.
1. The Downing Street chief of staff is a vital role
When I say that being the Downing Street chief of staff is a vital role, I do not mean it is indispensable. After all, it did not exist before 1997, which is a time before recorded history for many but vivid in the memory for some of us. Before Sir Tony Blair took office, the prime minister’s closest personal aide was his or her principal private secretary, a civil service role since the 1920s and generally given to high-flyers. The PPS was (and remains) in charge of the prime minister’s office, heading a team of private secretaries and other officials, and controlled the prime minister’s diary and therefore access to the premier. The occupant would not, however, take any part in party political matters and was bound by the same strictures of impartiality as any other civil servant. While prime ministers sometimes developed close working and personal relationships with their principal private secretaries, such as Edward Heath with Robert Armstrong, Margaret Thatcher with Robin Butler and Tony Blair with Jeremy Heywood, and might seek advice from them on a range of issues, more official advice on policy would come from the cabinet secretary (a role Armstrong, Butler and Heywood all went on to hold, as it happens).
Tony Blair had first met Jonathan Powell on a visit to Washington DC in 1993, when Blair was shadow home secretary and Powell was first secretary (political) at the British Embassy. The following year, on becoming leader of the Labour Party, Blair asked Powell to join his office and was rebuffed, but a year later Powell left the Diplomatic Service and became Blair’s chief of staff. When Labour won the 1997 general election, Powell was appointed as a special adviser and, under the Civil Service (Amendment) Order in Council 1997, was given the authority to issue instructions to civil servants (in fact he never needed to).
Powell’s new post partly supplanted the principal private secretary in terms of managing the prime minister’s office and staff, and took some of the responsibility from the cabinet secretary for advising the prime minister and working to co-ordinate government policy. The important consequence of taking this job out of the civil service and designating it as a special adviser role was that it allowed the incumbent to deal with party political issues and meant that the prime minister could choose whomever he wanted to serve: Powell ended up being chief of staff for the whole 10 years of Blair’s premiership to stay in position.
I wrote in The i last year with only slight hyperbole that we had not had a good chief of staff since Powell’s departure in 2007. Certainly he was brilliant at the job, calm, authoritative, almost eerily capable of managing crises and untying bureaucratic knots, and he was an invaluable adviser to Blair on Northern Ireland and a key figure in the achievement of the Belfast Agreement of 1998. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, who jointly served Theresa May from 2016 to 2017 when they were abruptly dismissed, were disastrous: they isolated May—a woman generally happy to be isolated from colleagues—and held an iron grip on access to her, as a result bearing much of the responsibility for the catastrophic 2017 general election. To prove I was being slightly unfair, Ed Llewellyn, who served David Cameron for his whole time in Downing Street (2010-16), was generally effective, and it is no coincidence that he, like Powell, had been chief of staff in opposition too.
The point about the chief of staff is that if a prime minister chooses to have one, the incumbent must be effective in a number of aspects: a capable administrator; a talented manager of people; a conciliator when necessary and aware of his or her status as an appointed official rather than an elected representative but secure in the authority of the prime minister to lay down the law; familiar with the workings of Whitehall and Westminster; and sensitive to political as well as policy issues. These tasks can be carried out by others, but if they are put in the hands of a chief of staff, they must be done well. I will come back to whether that is currently true.
2. Civil servants can make the transition to political roles
While David Wolfson (later Lord Wolfson of Sunningdale) held the title under Margaret Thatcher from 1979 to 1985, the current iteration of the position of Downing Street chief of staff is a creation of Sir Tony Blair and has been held formally by 11 people including Gray since 1997. It was vacant from 2008 to 2010 and from 2019 to 2021, though other officials carried out its duties in various forms. Four of Gray’s predecessors had civil service backgrounds: Jonathan Powell (1997-2007) and Edward Llewellyn (2010-16) had been in the Diplomatic Service, Tom Scholar (2007-08) was a civil servant when he held the job and Dan Rosenfield (2021-22) had worked in HM Treasury though he had then spent a decade in the private sector. With the exception of Scholar, Gray’s intermission between civil service and chief of staff was the shortest, and she had by far been the most senior, ending her career as a permanent secretary.
It is perfectly possible to have been an able and effective civil servant and then move into an explicitly political role. Harold Wilson had held a senior role at the Ministry of Fuel and Power during the Second World War and went on to serve as prime minister twice, Edward Heath had come top in the civil service examinations in 1946 and spent two years at the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Jim Callaghan had worked at the Inland Revenue before becoming an MP and the current prime minister Sir Keir Starmer held permanent secretary rank when he was director of public prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013. To take a few random examples, David Howell, Douglas Hurd, Clare Short, Andrew Lansley, David Willetts and Baroness Stowell of Beeston (a mixed bag, admittedly) had all been civil servants who later held cabinet positions.
I make this point only to say that Sue Gray should not be judged as some uniquely transgressive figure, blurring the edges of our impartial civil service or threatening the very basis of the Northcote-Trevelyan system. She is unusual in how long she spent in the civil service (more than 40 years), how senior she became (permanent secretary level) and how short an interval there was between her departure from the civil service and taking up an explicitly political role (six months). But those are differences of degree rather than kind.
3. No smoke without fire: Downing Street under Sir Keir Starmer
As I said before, I am quite prepared to believe that some, perhaps many, of the accusations and complaints currently circulating about Sue Gray are false, malicious or misrepresented. It is common knowledge that her relationship with the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, is not good, with deep roots: Case allegedly vetoed Gray becoming permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade in late 2022, which she realised would probably be her last opportunity to run her own department, while Gray’s “Partygate” report made stinging criticisms of “poor leadership” in Downing Street, which many interpreted to include Case, permanent secretary at Number 10 from May to September 2020 and thereafter cabinet secretary. Case has been criticised for failing to stop the recent spate of leaks about Gray, and a number of ministers have accused the cabinet secretary of being personally responsible for off-the-record briefings.
Case is due to retire either late this year or at the beginning of 2025 due to ill health, though the prime minister is growing impatient for him to set a specific date. Nevertheless, even if Case is leaking like a sieve to discredit and diminish Gray, it seems to me inconceivable that there is absolutely no truth in the picture which has been painted: of the chief of staff micromanaging ministerial and special adviser appointments, of controlling access to the prime minister, of being in a turf war with the head of political strategy, Morgan McSweeney, and of conducting herself in a high-handed and autocratic manner. When the news broke that she was earning a higher salary than Starmer himself, too many civil servants and Labour Party officials were willing to add fuel to the fire for the idea of Downing Street as an unhappy ship to be purely an invention of the media. There was real venom behind the anonymous remark that “Sue Gray is the only pensioner better off under Labour”.
Whatever the cause, there is dysfunction in Downing Street, and that matters. The Labour Party put an unusual emphasis on how it intended to govern, with Starmer making great play of his “mission-driven government” and promising to end siloed policy development and delivery. The corresponding “mission boards” have proved so far underwhelming: the prime minister has realised, sensibly, that he cannot chair them all, but information on them has been scarce, and so far as I can tell, only two have so far met, the Growth Mission Board chaired by chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Energy Mission Board under energy security secretary Ed Miliband.
Rather like the controversy over donations, this is an issue that matters because Starmer chose to make it important and must now live up to commitments and expectations. As I said in my recent article for The Spectator, Sue Gray’s most obvious selling point as a key member of Starmer’s team was her enormous experience of the civil service and of internal Whitehall processes and institutions, and much was made in the run-up to the election of how rigorous Labour’s planning was under her stewardship. Gray herself, who strictly rations her public pronouncements, was explicit on this matter, saying in April:
What I’m trying to do now in opposition is establish our way of working so we can walk in and start delivering. Even so, there’ll still be some departments who’ll struggle with that. Whitehall will not like this because they have no control.
Yet the government’s first 12 weeks have not notably demonstrated ministers and advisers hitting the ground running, and it was telling that, amid the hoo-ha over Gray’s salary, one special adviser was happy to say to the BBC (anonymously), “If you ever see any evidence of our preparations for government, please let me know”.
If Sir Keir Starmer wants to achieve both institutional and cultural change within government—and he certainly talked about doing so often enough while in opposition—it must be driven from the centre. There must be a clear and cross-departmental template for mission-based government, and Georgia Gould, the new MP for Queen’s Park and Maida Vale, was appointed parliamentary secretary at the Cabinet Office as a freshly elected Member to oversee this; as leader of Camden Council from 2017 to 2024, she pioneered this approach in local government and is entrusted with implementing it at a national level. If there is dissent or in-fighting in Downing Street, it is virtually impossible for the prime minister to provide leadership on these issues.
As things stand, there is a void at the centre of government. With Case’s departure date still uncertain, a competition to recruit a new cabinet secretary has not even begun (I looked at the latest rumours of potential candidates a month ago). Starmer has cancelled the appointment of the incoming national security adviser, General Gwyn Jenkins, originally announced by the previous government in April, and there will have to be a fresh competition to find another candidate.
In addition, though there seems (symbolically?) not to have been any formal announcement, it is widely reported that the prime minister’s principal private secretary, Elizabeth Perelman, who took up the post when Rishi Sunak moved into Downing Street in October 2022, has moved to a position in the Cabinet Office and her deputy, Kunal Patel, is currently holding the fort. Gray is said to be pushing for the appointment of Daniel Gieve, chief executive officer of the government’s Office for Investment, previously principal private secretary to Francis Maude as minister for the Cabinet Office before working for strategic consultants Finsbury. Some in the Labour Party, however, regard Gieve as too closely connected to the Conservatives, due to his relationships with Maude and Sunak, and the fact that Finsbury was founded by Roland Rudd, brother of former home secretary Amber Rudd. This has left the role of principal private secretary in stasis.
Almost unbelievably, according to reports in The Daily Mail which have not been denied, the uncertainty permeates further down that Perelman and Patel. “Of the 12 senior civil servants who comprise the Prime Minister’s Private Office, three have already left, five have asked to be moved and the remaining four have downed tools and are threatening to quit.”
A large proportion of this unholy mess was avoidable, and as Downing Street chief of staff it is Sue Gray’s job to bring the operation under control. The late Jeremy Heywood, highly regarded cabinet secretary from 2012 to 2018, was famed in Whitehall for demanding of officials “You need to grip this”. The current situation seems to suggest she is not gripping it, which leads one to wonder if that is because she cannot.
Conclusion
It may not seem that way to the casual observer, but British politics is more sane and reasoned when Parliament is sitting. In that regard, it is worth noting that both Houses have been in recess for all but two weeks since the end of July, first with a truncated summer adjournment and now with the break for the party conferences. That has allowed the temperature of speculation and rumour to rise higher that it otherwise might have done, certainly concerning the prime minister, his chief of staff and the running of Downing Street. That said, there is simply too much noise, and too many people willing to contribute to it, to dismiss everything as a product of the silly season.
Sir Keir Starmer’s office is not working effectively or harmoniously. To argue that it is defies logic, reason and evidence. Government sources have understandably tried to downplay the problems, and they may well have a point. But the difficulties are materially affecting the government’s reputation and delivery, and that needs to stop. The prime minister recently insisted that he was in control—a declaration leaders rarely need to make when they really are in control—and he has a few days’ grace while the Conservative Party conference is held in Birmingham and some of the media focus will shift to the opposition. I don’t know if Gray will stay in the short term or whether Starmer will decide that, like many advisers who themselves become the story, she is doing more harm than good, but he must accomplish several tasks quickly: set a timetable for appointing a new cabinet secretary and national security adviser; find a new principal private secretary; stop the torrent of leaks from Downing Street; and make peace within his own office. None of these is an easy matter, but neither can any be avoided. The clock is ticking.