“It’s a combination of hypocrisy, naivety and arrogance,” says one former Number 10 special adviser. “There is a lot of exaggeration in politics but I find this astonishing.”
Sue Gray was always going to have a huge impact on the new Labour administration, but the powerful civil servant turned government enforcer has already broken the golden rule of unelected political figures. She has become the story. The revelations that Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff is being paid £170,000 a year – £3,000 more than his boss – and the ongoing white noise about the string of gifts and presents given to the Prime Minister and senior ministers have led former special advisers who once worked with him to lament how Gray has gone from overseeing the ethics of high politics in Britain to overseeing what some claim are double standards.
The special adviser (commonly known as spads) added: “Firstly, quite rightly, the Labour opposition has been harsh on the Conservatives in government for perceived financial impropriety and self-interest, using words like ‘scum’ – it’s madness to think that you can’t somehow be held to exactly the same standards after doing all that. Secondly, in Sue Gray’s case, she’s made her career and her name as a guardian of standards in government. It’s really hard to understand how she’s not bothered by the perception of the message her salary sends.”
In a sign of how much the spotlight has been on Gray, and how fed up the Labour hierarchy is with the apparent discontent with the situation seeping out of Downing Street, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, quipped at an event at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool: “It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Sue Gray is covering up Lord Lucan and she shot JFK and I can’t even begin to tell you what she did to Shergar.” He added wryly: “I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this, to be honest.” It didn’t go unnoticed that Gray, who accompanied Starmer to the recent north London derby between Tottenham and Arsenal, decided to stay away from Labour’s first Party Conference since 2009.
“He was a really toxic influence on the government,” says a second former Tory special adviser. “When Starmer first hired him, there was a real gasp from a lot of the slobs who had done business with him in government, and also from a lot of civil servants who were generally too sensible to say anything. If you’re Starmer, why would you go in and immediately abandon the team that helped you get into government and immediately abandon the team that you trusted to get you into Whitehall?”
“He had a position of protection when he was in the Civil Service – now he’s been exposed even more,” says the first special adviser. “The way he’s treated some of his colleagues in the Labour Party means he’s made enemies and reduced his own political capital in the party. In difficult times you need allies.” Number 10 says: “We do not comment on leaked information or on such reports regarding individuals.”
Gray has, of course, come under public scrutiny before, but until he left Whitehall to work for Labour, he was widely regarded as a staunch advocate of objective decency and a politically neutral Civil Service. Having held a variety of roles in a range of government departments since the 1990s, he served as director general of the Compliance and Ethics team at the Cabinet Office between 2012 and 2018.
“I have a rather uneasy recollection of personally negotiating my salary with Sue,” the first special counsel explains. “We were treated with great arrogance because we were told that government should be whiter than white and that it was a privilege to do the job and that you didn’t do it for the money. All of this was said by Sue. If she did all this now with full knowledge, it’s astonishing arrogance.”
Grey has led two Cabinet Office inquiries, the first in 2012 into the “plebgate” affair that led to Andrew Mitchell’s resignation as deputy leader. The second, in 2017, into the conduct of then First Secretary of State Damian Green. After a spell in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Grey returned to Whitehall in 2021 as Second Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office.
Its most notable investigation came when Cabinet Secretary Simon Case recused himself from looking into the “party gate” allegations. He took over the investigation into whether then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson knew about social gatherings at Number 10 during the pandemic lockdown. Its initial findings were published on 31 January 2022, and the full report – following a Metro Police investigation – was delivered in May that year, with devastating impact on Johnson’s premiership.
“As a public servant I have never seen any reason to doubt his impartiality in making inquiries,” says the first adviser. “I have seen spads and ministers treated badly by him but I have seen it universally and I think Labour advisers in the new administration would say the same thing: he wanted them to accept pay cuts and not sign contracts straight away. That is not helping the government to run smoothly. Many advisers from the Cameron coalition onwards would have said the same thing. The big question now is whether Sue seems happy to do it – perhaps for good reasons – but not willing to learn by example.”
Number 10 says: “On the issue of pay, while we do not comment on reports relating to members of staff, as has been publicly stated, special advisers cannot ‘authorise the expenditure of public funds or be responsible for budgets’ under the Code of Conduct. Therefore, all decisions on special adviser salaries and conditions are made by officials, not political appointees. The Special Adviser People Board is chaired by a senior official with formal authority to make all final decisions on pay.”
In March 2023, Grey resigned from the Cabinet Office and was appointed as Starmer’s chief of staff in September, an appointment that was criticised by some Conservative MPs who questioned his neutrality on the partigate issue. Grey, whose son Liam Conlon is currently MP for Beckenham and Penge, has formally joined the Labour Party.
“To be fair, he has worked in the Civil Service for a very long time and he knows that the tenure for these roles is short, so he thinks his salary reflects all those years of service,” says a third former Downing Street staffer. “But anyone who is really political knows that he shouldn’t be on a higher salary than the Prime Minister. Maybe it’s a power play and he associates Starmer with him because he will have to agree to it.”
“Just Sue’s appointment was huge news because of the way it happened,” says the first adviser. “Whether you like it or not, Sue Gray is a lightning rod and that was true from the moment she decided to take on the job of investigating Partygate and continued until she became Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. It’s never a comfortable place for an adviser to be and it’s completely the wrong place for an adviser to be. You can’t do the job effectively if you’re the story.”
His long-term chairmanship of the Compliance and Ethics team meant Gray also oversaw policies around donations, gifts and presents – raising the same questions that have resurfaced in the fortnight since revelations that Starmer had accepted a series of gifts from Labour donor Lord Alli and that Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson had also considered similar opportunities. There is no suggestion that ministers or Lord Alli broke any rules, but questions of public perception and political judgement remain.
“People don’t make the best policy decisions when they’re not inherently political,” explains the third former special adviser. “Civil servants don’t understand the culture of party politics and all that it entails from the bottom up. The same goes for accepting gifts and hospitality, and the same goes for salary. There was a strong sense in the Labour Party that because they hadn’t been in power for so long, they weren’t at the front of the queue for gifts like concert tickets. It sounds ridiculous, but to them it feels like a reward for all the hard work of years. They feel they’ve earned it.”
“It’s absolutely astonishing to me that he didn’t notice the freebies being given to the Labour front benches,” says the second special adviser. “It’s hypocritical because he was responsible for checking the interests and conflicts of ministers in the Cabinet Office.”
Downing Street sources said at the start of the party conference that Starmer was not expected to be involved in any of the above., The fact that Rayner or Reeves accepted any gift of clothing suggests that, although there was nothing inappropriate about the arrangement, fears of public ridicule were finally being taken seriously. On the eve of the conference, Starmer said: Observer: “I always said that the rules should be followed. That’s what I follow [Boris] Johnson was not following the rules.” Asked about Gray’s salary, he added: “I am not going to talk about individual salaries for any staff. I am the person who runs the government. I am the person who makes the decisions and takes responsibility for those decisions.”
“The problem here is not Sue, it’s Starmer’s judgement,” says the second spat. “He’s already behaving in the mould of Dominic Cummings, which I think is really surprising because he’s witnessed this [his behaviour] “First-hand. She doesn’t really understand what a chief of staff is. Sue was someone who created her own processes in a dark corner of Whitehall. And that’s the really critical difference between what she did before and what she does now, she’s a much more public figure. She can’t hide.”