What Sue Gray’s exit tells us about Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership - David Behrens

It was part of Gray’s job to manage the flow of good news stories and mitigate the bad ones. This she failed spectacularly to do. She couldn’t even put a positive spin on her own departure.

She leaves behind an administration flailing around like a helpless trout, overtaken by non-stories about gifts from party donors and the leaked personal information that she earned more than her boss. As one party mole put it, she was the only pensioner in Britain to be better off under Labour.

But what made the Prime Minister ever think that someone who built a career on avoiding scrutiny and the public gaze could suddenly take centre stage and run the show? The appointment raised more questions about his judgement than hers.

Three years ago Sue Gray was unknown to the public. A career civil servant, she had climbed the greasy pole to the Cabinet Office where, as she approached retirement, she was made ‘director general of propriety and ethics’, a title that speaks volumes about the prevailing standards. Is there another organisation in the country that finds it necessary to have such a person?

By virtue of this confected position she was chosen to lead the inquiry into lockdown parties in Downing Street. Even then she was second choice, the ineffectual Cabinet Secretary Simon Case having disqualified himself when it emerged that one of the knees-ups had been in his own department.

Perhaps it was the excoriation of Boris Johnson in Gray’s report that led Starmer to believe she was someone to fear. But eviscerating people on paper is quite different to managing them face-to-face. (It’s a point that could also be made about newspaper columnists.)

The useful thing Gray did bring to Starmer’s office was an intimate knowledge of the civil service and, more specifically, how to circumvent it. The two factions mix like oil and water; politicians are there to instil change and it is the job of their administrators to stop them.

But where civil servants thrive on anonymity, politicos need the oxygen of publicity – and Gray’s cloistered life in Whitehall’s shadows ill prepared her for the bruising reality of the daily news agenda.

Starmer must have known this; his two predecessors as elected Labour prime ministers chose hard-boiled Fleet Street hacks to control their public and press relations: Joe Haines and Alastair Campbell. Either would have stamped on the nonsense about free spectacles and Taylor Swift tickets as casually as stubbing out a smouldering fag-end.

The PM has now installed a more combative individual to run his communications operation – the long-serving party activist Morgan McSweeney, who as Labour’s campaigns director is credited with bringing them to power.

But therein lies another misconception because this wasn’t an election Labour really won; it was handed to them on a plate. Starmer’s campaign was predicated almost entirely on not being Rishi Sunak; his manifesto as noncommittal as a council press release.

McSweeney’s first test will be to mitigate the fallout from Rachel Reeves’ unwise decision to withdraw winter fuel payments from everyone over 66 without announcing any balancing measures at the same time. Two months have passed since her hand-grenade policy blew away the headiness of victory yet this wholly negative initiative remains the only significant commitment the government has made, save for capitulating to the transport unions.

It isn’t a proposal completely without precedent; in 1999 the Blair government’s welfare reforms cut disability benefits by £750m and caused outrage among backbenchers who felt their party had betrayed its principles. But such was Blair and Campbell’s preoccupation with presentation that the cuts were kept until mid-term and tempered by wider, less divisive changes.

Those obsessions have given way to indifference and no-one wants a return to the relentless spin cycles of past administrations. But we wouldn’t mind the odd spoonful of sugar to take away the taste of the medicine we’re being given – and if McSweeney can’t administer it he may find himself bumped off as mysteriously as Sue Gray.