The legacy of Sue Gray: from disruptor to disaster

The ultimate insider brought in to prepare the Labour Party for government after 14 years in the cold left Starmer floundering and was forced to quit: what happened?

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The Times is making a feast of extracts from Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. It certainly seems rich in gripping anecdote, and one episode, of Dominic Cummings presenting a plan to Jeremy Corbyn in early 2019 to bring down Theresa May’s government, was the basis of an article I wrote today for The i Paper. This kind of instant history has inevitable strengths and weaknesses but the authors are respected and knowledgeable journalists, and there is a lot of food for thought in the excerpts published so far.

I was particularly struck by a section examining the rise and downfall of Sue Gray, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff first in opposition and then, briefly, in Downing Street. The former civil servant lasted three months and a day after the general election before resigning because she had become a “distraction” (the standard excuse whenever a departing figure is unwilling to admit any fault); for a while it was said she would occupy a new role as the Prime Minister’s Envoy for the Nations and Regions, which sounded made-up and never materialised. Gray was, however, nominated for a peerage by Starmer in December 2024.

In Maguire and Pogrund’s account, Gray was little short of a disaster as a chief of staff, if not in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office then certainly in Downing Street. Moreover, the evidence they adduce suggests strongly that her failure in the role was due to her own errors and inadequacies. From the very beginning, in their view, she was miscast:

For years, Gray had carved out a unique role as a troubleshooter and investigator, one which had limited, if any, crossover, with the managerial, strategic and political responsibilities of a chief of staff.

Her attitude to the colleagues with whom she had to work, whose backgrounds and experiences in electoral and party politics were infinitely more extensive than hers, was high-handed and dismissive.

Gray made it her business to educate the lads in the facts of life and government. They did not take kindly to her lessons. The chief of staff posed questions to which they believed they knew the answers. At all hours of the day she sent messages that made them roll their eyes. They began to wonder whether the woman who now controlled the Labour Party really understood it.

It had long been rumoured that Gray found the circle of advisers around Starmer male-dominated not just in terms of numbers but in terms of culture and outlook. This may well be true and would be a plausible criticism: partly because of its roots in the trades union movement, there has always been an element of closed-shop machismo in the Labour Party, and it remains striking that there has never been a substantive female leader (Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman both acted ad interim). Meanwhile Kemi Badenoch is the fourth woman to lead the Conservative Party in 50 years. I explored the issue of Labour’s ‘woman problem’ at the beginning of last year.

The failure on Gray’s part which interests me most, however, is the apparent lack of any plan of action once Labour won the general election last July. I find it particularly compelling not just because she seems to have been at fault—politicians and advisers make mistakes—but because it represents the diametric opposite of the narrative which was presented on her behalf and indeed of the justification for her appointment as Starmer’s chief adviser in the first place.

Sue Gray enters the narrative

Let us go back briefly to the genesis of this. In March 2023, it was reported that Starmer was considering appointing Gray as Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition. This was newsworthy because she was a veteran civil servant who had started work straight from school in a Jobcentre in Cricklewood in 1973 and had over the intervening decades risen to Second Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office, the highest level of Whitehall’s mandarinate. It was given added piquancy, however, because Gray, formerly in charge of propriety and ethics across the civil service, had conducted the internal investigation in “Partygate”, the apparent repeated breaches of lockdown regulations in Downing Street which involved the then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Her report when it was published in May 2022 was one of the factors which contributed to Johnson’s departure from office later that summer.

Gray’s transition from long-serving public servant to political party employee was controversial. The appointment was referred to the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) which approved (rather than endorsed) it but recommended a waiting period of six months between her formal departure from the civil service and taking up her new role in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office. There was undoubtedly some criticism which stemmed purely from political motives, but a Cabinet Office inquiry concluded in July 2023 that Gray had breached the Civil Service Code by failing to disclose the fact that she had spoken to Starmer about the potential role while she was still working in Whitehall. The Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Dowden had previously informed the House of Commons that Gray had declined to participate in the investigation.

At the time, I was sympathetic to Gray’s position, arguing that politically neutral civil servants were perfectly entitled to move on to more partisan employment and should not have their earlier careers reframed in retrospect. For obvious personal reasons I still believe that in principle. On reflection, however, I was perhaps too generous towards her. Clearly some of her conduct was in breach of the rules and may have been partly fuelled by resentment and a feeling that she had been poorly treated by the civil service. Certainly, she had been extraordinarily frank on the record with the BBC about her disappointment at not being appointed Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service in 2020, saying “people may have thought that I perhaps was too much of a challenger, or a disrupter. I am both.”

It was Gray’s non-party background and her experience of Whitehall that Starmer wanted. In Maguire and Pogrund’s description, he wanted “a bureaucrat”, because he himself was “a man of formalities and structure”. A few months after her appointment, The Financial Times described her as the “de facto chief executive of his office” who had “brought more structure… by straightening out numerous overlapping power structures and hierarchies”. One senior Labour figure said “there was an expectation that she would be focusing on… the mission-driven government, breaking down silos, civil service planning”, though went on to note that Gray also quickly became an influential policy adviser.

Some apparently minor observations struck me: it was noted that Gray was strict on keeping meetings running to schedule, and that she meticulously kept notes of meetings. Neither is inherently seismic, though both are a vital element of effective and orderly administration, but they had obviously been absent from the Leader of the Opposition’s Office before her arrival, which is in itself significant. And they represented a microcosm of her role working for Starmer, as a hugely experienced administrator who had an instinctive grip on process.

It is worth reflecting on the paths that had brought Starmer and Gray to where they were. The Prime Minister is an eminent barrister but had also served as Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013. In that role, he had been a permanent secretary-level official, responsible for an organisation of several thousand employees, and he had attended the weekly meetings of the 40 or so permanent secretaries known as “Wednesday Morning Colleagues”, held in the Cabinet Office and chaired by the Cabinet Secretary. In formal terms, Starmer is by far the most senior civil servant to go on to become Prime Minister and although he was not a mainstream Whitehall warrior, he arrived in Downing Street vastly more familiar with the way government works than many of his predecessors.

Gray had also latterly held permanent secretary rank, as Second Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office (2021-23). She had also spent a secondment to the Northern Ireland Civil Service as Permanent Secretary of the Department of Finance (2018-21). She had applied unsuccessfully to run the Northern Ireland Civil Service (see above), and was also believed to be disappointed not to have held a similar appointment in London. In Maguire and Pogrund’s words:

More than anything else she longed to be a permanent secretary, to run a Whitehall department of her own, to prove herself the equal of the posh boys.

The appointment of the 41-year-old Simon Case (Bristol Grammar School, Trinity College, Cambridge, Garrick Club) as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service in 2020 had been especially galling for Gray, more than 20 years his senior, especially as he was not even a permanent secretary when given the job. He had been on secondment to the Royal Household as Private Secretary to the Duke of Cambridge since 2018, and his last civil service post had been as Director General for Northern Ireland and Ireland at the Department for Exiting the European Union. Their relationship was never warm.

If Gray’s background in social and educational terms was different from many of her colleagues, so was her professional experience. She was overwhelmingly an expert in process and delivery rather than policy-making: from 2012 to 2018 she ran the Propriety and Ethics Group in the Cabinet Office as well as being responsible for private offices. She had also overseen the reform of non-departmental bodies in 2010.

Tailor-made for the role?

This all suggested that she was ideally suited to manage the Labour Party’s preparations for government. She knew the “hidden wiring”, in Peter Hennessy’s famous phrase, intimately, and Starmer was acutely aware that only eight members of his shadow cabinet had any ministerial experience at all, and only five had been in cabinet. After 14 years in opposition, Labour lacked in-depth knowledge of how to run a government, and Gray seemed an obvious person to make good some of that deficit.

Such arguments were quite explicitly made. She would prepare for and then implement the kind of institutional and procedural changes needed for Starmer’s much-vaunted “mission-driven government”, designed to focus departments on key policy objectives, break down silos and encourage cross-departmental cooperation. With a deliberate element of challenge to her former colleagues, Gray talked of introducing so-called “citizens’ assemblies” to consider especially difficult areas of policy, and she would ensure that incoming ministers and advisers were fully prepared to start work quickly. I was told more than once at lectures and seminars that part of her role as Chief of Staff before the election was to audit policy proposals for each departmental brief and amalgamate them into a coherent skeleton King’s Speech, a shadow version of the Parliamentary Business and Legislation cabinet committee which oversees the government’s legislative programme.

This all made sense. It seemed to draw on Gray’s background and experience, perform a role in the opposition’s organisation that had not previously been filled in a systematic way, and minimised her lack of party political experience (she was not even a member of the Labour Party when she joined Starmer’s office). It also seemed to fit in with the image that Starmer projected: serious, high-minded, efficient and competent. Moreover it reflected a logical division within the Leader of the Opposition’s Office: Morgan McSweeney, who had been Starmer’s Chief of Staff for the first 14 months of his tenure, was Director of Campaigns, responsible for electoral strategy and communications, while Gray focused on the nuts and bolts of administration. In essence, McSweeney’s job was to get Labour elected, while Gray looked after what the party would do once it got there.

Reality bites

So how did it go so wrong? What could possibly transpire to see Gray resign after only three months in post (for seven weeks of which, let us remember, Parliament had not been sitting)? There are many factors which have been adduced, which were explored in the media and will be thoroughly ventilated in Maguire and Pogrund’s book. The element I found interesting, however, is that the woman who seemed to be ideally suited for the specific role she was given failed in that role in no small part due to failings of conduct, manner and personality. In other words, she was hired because she would be good at the job, but it transpired that she was actively bad at it.

Although Gray was nominally in charge of planning the government’s priorities after an election win, the thorough groundwork of which everyone was reassured simply seems not to have been done. This was a huge lapse: how a new administration conducts itself in its very first days, weeks and months is seen as indicative of its priorities, its competence and its overall tenor. Practical minds may scoff at the idea of the “first 100 days”, a gimmick pioneered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, but presentation matters. Starmer obviously wanted to give the impression of a serious-minded leader who was fully in control from the moment he took office, but announcements were made without consultation, and many around the leader felt that information was being fed to Gray as the Chief of Staff and disappearing.

There had been access talks between Labour Party officials and civil servants before the general election, under the so-called “Douglas-Home rules”, which had started in February 2024, though some felt these had not been permitted to begin as quickly as they might have been. Work was reportedly underway on some 20 bills which would be announced in the first King’s Speech of the new parliament. Yet, according to Labour sources, Gray was either not sharing her thoughts on the shape of a potential government, or had not had them.

We were doing bucketloads of work, and it felt like it was all going into a black hole. Certainly, as we got into the election period, we said: we really should be talking about cabinet appointments. We really should be talking about a plan for the first hundred days and the first fortnight. We were constantly being told: ‘Oh yeah, yeah, we’ll come on to that.’ And it never happened.

One distinctive aspect of Labour’s plans for which Gray was supposed to be responsible was the creation of “mission boards” to implement Starmer’s “mission-driven government”. These would be cross-cutting bodies, which at first Starmer said he would chair himself, and they would draw on the experience and expertise of the private sector as well as bringing together ministers and officials; they were trailed as a radical new approach to governance which would transform effectiveness and focus.

In fact they have turned out to be nothing of the sort. With neither specific executive powers nor budgetary authority, they are hard to distinguish from traditional cabinet committees, and the Prime Minister was forced to promise an overhaul of them after a few months, in the weeks following Gray’s departure. They are now chaired by “the respective lead Secretaries of State”, while the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Pat McFadden, acts as Deputy Chair of all five boards, but it is striking that their membership is not listed alongside cabinet committees (nor, so far as I can tell, is it systematically listed anywhere).

Apart from active policy planning, there seems to have been no anticipation of political pitfalls, large or small, which might present themselves. Even the most fair-minded observer would be forced to concede that the government encountered an extraordinary number of presentational issues, some of which represented more significant failings and some of which did not. Almost all had added potency because of the high moral tone which Starmer and his colleagues had taken against the Conservative government in opposition: they had to be whiter than white, and when they were not, the weight of public disenchantment fell on them. This was in spite of the fact that Gray had reportedly prepared a dossier identifying exactly these sorts of challenges, dubbed “Sue’s shit list”. One Labour official felt Gray was substantially to blame for much of this. There was:

a total lack of foresight or awareness about the criticism that would be coming down the pipe over crony appointments, wealthy donors, freebies… all the stuff she assumed would be OK because the Tories had done the same thing.

Another source of friction was relations with colleagues, especially inside Downing Street. The Chief of Staff holds a critical role, and, if the job is done well, it can be a huge bonus to the Prime Minister, a genuine ‘force multiplier’ across Whitehall. Boris Johnson had initially lacked a Chief of Staff in formal terms: Dominic Cummings was “Chief Adviser”, refusing the Chief of Staff role unless he had the power to hire and fire, while Sir Edward Lister was “Chief Strategic Adviser”. Eventually, Johnson brought in Dan Rosenfield, a former HM Treasury civil servant who had left to work in the private sector, but he was not a success and departed after 13 months, and in an unconventional move Steve Barclay, a sitting MP, was appointed and combined the role with that of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. There was no improvement and he was moved to be Health Secretary in the dying days of the Johnson government, with his deputy, Baroness Finn, taking the position ad interim before the new Prime Minister was appointed.

I argued in The i Paper in 2003 that Jonathan Powell, Sir Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff for the full decade of his premiership, was the first and last truly effective occupant of the office (setting aside the experimental and latterly part-time tenure of Lord Wolfson of Sunningdale in Baroness Thatcher’s early days). Certainly, Gray did not master the duties or the levers of power. Morgan McSweeney, who had been Starmer’s first Chief of Staff in 2020-21, was appointed Head of Political Strategy in Downing Street, the theory being that he would be responsible for essentially political issues while Gray dealt with official and administrative matters. That was a distinction which was doomed from the beginning, as it is never clearly defined inside government.

Within a week, McSweeney met Darren Tierney, Director General of the Propriety and Constitution Group in the Cabinet Office, and was told that, as Head of Political Strategy, he was not entitled to a Downing Street email address and could not have access to government documents without a minister or a special adviser being present. It was widely believed that Tierney was acting on Gray’s instructions (and it was noted that he occupied her former role as head or propriety and ethics). Indeed, so carefully did Gray intend to police the division between her bailiwick and McSweeney’s that the latter and his staff were forbidden from using Downing Street teabags.

McSweeney appealed to the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, who, in the words of The Times, “struggled to believe what he heard”. The message was conveyed that this interpretation of propriety was mistaken, and that the Head of Political Strategy could have access to official documents (and teabags). Case, who would soon retire on grounds of ill health, supposedly asked an emissary to Gray, “Can you go and tell them how things actually work, please?”

More generally, Gray became a bottleneck in Number 10 Downing Street. It was rumoured that she insisted on approving appointments not only of ministers but also of special advisers, and it is certainly true that some ministerial appointments took an unusually long time to be made: it was a fortnight after the general election that Hamish Falconer was appointed Foreign Office minister for the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and more than two weeks until Baroness Twycross was named Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. (By contrast, even the most junior members of the Whips’ Office in the first Blair administration were appointed within seven days of the Prime Minister kissing hands.) There was also a fierce row over the terms and conditions for incoming special advisers which was attributed to Gray.

Connected to this apparent impulse to hoard decision-making authority was the strict exercise of control over access to the Prime Minister himself, with Gray reportedly limiting the number of people who were granted meetings and the length of time they were given with Starmer. The Financial Times reported one senior civil servant complaining that “it was not uncommon for security chiefs to moan about not having enough ‘facetime’ with the prime minister”.

There is undoubtedly a need for prime ministers to have a determined and dedicated ‘gatekeeper’; Kate Fall, as Deputy Chief of Staff, had fulfilled that role for David Cameron to the extent that it was the title of her account of life in Downing Street, while Tony Blair initially relied on Anji Hunter, whose formal title was Director of Government Relations. However, to be effective, a gatekeeper must also have the ability to be diplomatic and emollient, and Gray, it seems, had alienated colleagues for other reasons. Restricting access to Starmer, therefore, was simply added to the charge sheet against her.

Another storm erupted in the media in mid-September last year when it was revealed that, thanks to a revised pay scale for special advisers, Gray was receiving a salary of £170,000, substantially more than her predecessor, Liam Booth-Smith, and, awkwardly, a few thousand pounds higher than that of the Prime Minister. I argued at the time, and still believe, that in principle this is not an outrageous level of remuneration for such a critical role in government; I pointed out that the chief of staff to the board of directors at Goldman Sachs, John Rogers, receives more than £8 million. I did add, however, that more generous remuneration relied on the job being done well and could only be justified if there were “open and transparent recruitment and rigorous performance management”.

The brouhaha over her salary was not important in itself but as another weapon in the hands of her detractors. The challenge she faced at that stage was the concatenation of failures, real and imagined, and I wrote an article for The Spectator summing up her predicament which was entitled “What is the point of Sue Gray?” The pressure was now becoming intolerable: I penned that article on 24 September, when criticism of Gray was becoming a blizzard, and she resigned less than a fortnight later, on 6 October. For a little over a month, it was maintained she would take up a nebulous new role in the Cabinet Office as the Prime Minister’s Envoy for the Nations and Regions, but then in November it was announced that this would no longer go ahead. Downing Street said that Gray had “decided not to take it up”, but the accepted narrative, which the government did not deny, was that Starmer had withdrawn the offer; one anonymous source called it “a bad idea that would lead to endless drama and probably another resignation down the line”, and no-one else has been nominated to take up the post.

Lessons learned

Even by the standards of British politics, Sue Gray’s tenure as Downing Street Chief of Staff is striking for its brevity and drama. What I find most remarkable is the dissonance between what was intended and what transpired: the extent to which she was deemed capable of preparing the Labour Party for the realities of government after 14 years in opposition, and her abject failure to do so. Her background as a hugely experienced civil servant and a cunning Whitehall operator represented her unique selling point to Sir Keir Starmer, yet she was part of an incoming administration which has struggled more acutely to master the behaviours and habits of governing than perhaps any since the first Labour government of January 1924. The gap is simply breathtaking.

I have compiled a catalogue of failures above, both from Maguire and Pogrund’s book and from contemporary media reports, and if it seems like it is sharply condemnatory of Gray personally, that it because that’s where the weight of evidence seems to lie. It is worth pointing to some mitigating factors. Starmer, whose judgement of character and suitability for appointments is not impeccable by any means, may have misled himself with regard to Gray’s career history; if he had examined it in detail, he would have seen that it was very niche in civil service terms, with her most senior posts relating to matters like propriety and ethics and crisis management, rather than either policy advice or overseeing large departments of numbers of staff. Indeed, she felt keenly and resented the fact that she had never been permanent secretary of a mainstream Whitehall ministry (and had only acted in that capacity on the much smaller scale of the Northern Ireland Executive for three years, for more than half of which the Executive had been suspended). Therefore the Prime Minister may have overestimated the extent to which her skills were aligned with the role he needed her to carry out.

Gray was also required to return to government in a vastly different and explicitly political role a relatively short time after her departure from the civil service. She left the Cabinet Office, where she had been Second Permanent Secretary, in March 2023, joined the Leader of the Opposition’s Office in September 2023 and was appointed Downing Street Chief of Staff in July 2024: so only 16 months separated her life as a political impartial official and the Prime Minister’s chief Downing Street adviser. To an extent, this left her as neither fish nor fowl. She had clearly moved into a different context and would no longer be absolutely up to speed with the mood of her former colleagues, but the gap had not been long enough to act as much of a firebreak.

There were many senior officials still in the same roles they had held when she had been a civil servant, including the Cabinet Secretary (though Case was obviously not going to remain in post for very long) and the Permanent Secretaries at, among other organisations, HM Treasury, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Business and Trade and the Ministry of Justice. Similarly the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary, Elizabeth Perelman, had dealt with Gray in her previous life, as had Sir Tim Barrow, National Security Adviser (though he was given the nod then unappointed as the next Ambassador to the United States and his appointed successor, General Gwyn Jenkins, had his appointment reversed). The same was true of the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service and the Director-General of the Security Service. This was bound to make changing gears a challenging task.

There is no standard pattern for Downing Street Chiefs of Staff. Of the ten people who had held the post substantively before Gray, beginning with Jonathan Powell in 1997, only one, Sir Tom Scholar (2007-08) had been a serving civil servant, while Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy (2016-17) had transferred from the same role at the Home Office. Gavin Barwell (2017-19) was a former minister and MP who had lost his seat, and Steve Barclay, uniquely, doubled up as a minister. But three predecessors—Jonathan Powell (1997-2007), Ed Llewellyn (2010-16) and Dan Rosenfield (2021-22)—were former civil servants who had spent time elsewhere before returning, as Gray did. Powell had set Gray’s path almost exactly: he had left the Diplomatic Service in 1995 to become Chief of Staff to the Leader of the Opposition then translated the role into Downing Street in 1997. Llewellyn had served David Cameron for four and a half years in opposition after working in Hong Kong, at the European Commission and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Rosenfield had left the Treasury and spent a decade at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Hakluyt & Co. But still Gray had not been able to make it work.

Sir Keir Starmer has to bear some responsibility, as the figure at the head of an organisation always must. He appointed Gray, he defined her role (or allowed her to define it) and either did not ensure that she was working smoothly with other members of his office and in the Labour Party, or took too easily assurances from her and others that all was well. The account in The Times relates that he “seemed oblivious to the enmity [between Gray and others]—but that was Starmer, forever uninterested in the politics of politics itself”. Certainly, as a latecomer to politics, yet to mark a decade even as a Member of Parliament, he has often seemed not only unfamiliar but positively impatient with some of the niceties of everyday political life; in opposition he often seemed to prefer the company and counsel of his close, appointed advisers to that of his shadow cabinet, and he had little time for schmoozing or cajoling Labour MPs.

Starmer certainly understood that a successful chief of staff, whether in Downing Street or any other organisation, has to enjoy an intimate relationship of trust with his or her principal. There are other vital aspects too, however: the relationship must also be absolutely and unflinchingly honest, with the chief of staff never afraid to deliver bad news or unwelcome counsel; the principal must demonstrate complete and public support for the chief of staff; and the chief of staff must be able to cooperate with colleagues at various levels and in a number of ways, from exerting hard authority to using gentle persuasion. It is not clear that the Starmer/Gray relationship fulfilled all of these qualities. (I wrote an analysis of the role of chief of staff for Spear’s in 2023.)

Sue Gray seems to have failed as Downing Street Chief of Staff for two main reasons. The first was a series of mistakes which stemmed from personality and behaviour: she was secretive, domineering, acquisitive of power and determined to control the Prime Minister’s immediate ‘court’. The second reason, I think, is an extrinsic one for which she cannot straightforwardly be blamed: she was hired as an insider/outsider. That is, she was a veteran civil servant but one who had enjoyed an unusual career trajectory and had a complicated and sometimes hostile relationship with the civil service as an institution. At the same time, given more than four decades in Whitehall, she lacked any distance or external perspective on the business of government in the way from which a new administration might have benefited. She was neither close enough nor far enough away.

As for her replacement, Morgan McSweeney, time will tell whether he is substantially more effective. Certainly the reorganisation of Number 10 Downing Street which accompanied his appointment seems to have stemmed the flow of rumours and sniping from within the centre of government. He has now been in post longer than Gray was, though it would be hard to argue that Starmer’s administration is performing significantly better, and the Cabinet is meeting today (Friday 7 February) for a long strategic discussion which, sources insist, is not a reset. We shall see.

Baroness Gray of Tottenham will be introduced to the House of Lords on Tuesday 11 February.