Office politics can be complicated. And Westminster can get obsessed with personalities behind the scenes and where someone sits on the office floor plan. But with all that being said, it is true to say that relations between Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, and some others in the early days of Keir Starmer’s government were, if anything, worse than reported.
She is not the first outsider who found it impossible to gel with Starmer’s close-knit and fiercely political team who ran his leadership campaign and worked on Labour’s election strategy. His former chief of staff Sam White departed after just over a year.
There were no actual angry words between Gray and Morgan McSweeney, who has taken over from her, on a personal level, but there were two very clear power bases in the operation, which was unsustainable.
Now there is one. It is a clean sweep for the political team, which has the loyalty of most special advisers, many cabinet ministers and which most in Labour credit for the election victory. It has no one left to blame now for any mistakes that are to come.
It was Gray – fairly or unfairly – whom many blamed for the missteps that coloured Labour’s first 100 days in government. Gray was billed as the guardian of ethics, who drew up the structures of the team in No 10 and who vetted donors and appointments. Who then is the convenient person to blame for the weeks of bad headlines over the donations from Waheed Alli to Starmer and others, and Lord Alli’s subsequent temporary pass for No 10?
Gray was said to be adamant that she wanted to keep a tight grip on special advisers, keeping numbers down and contracts strict. Who then is the convenient person to blame for infighting, for cuts to salaries and for those who should have been appointed as special advisers being cack-handedly put in as civil servants, such as Rachel Reeves’s appointment of her adviser Ian Corfield? And who then was found out being paid more than the prime minister?
And Gray was also said to be in charge throughout the election campaign of the transition to government, of the 100-day plans and the priority of early legislation and key political moments. Who then is the easy person to blame for the early weeks being dominated by rows over cronyism and freebies and for what felt like a void of any positive stories about what the government was doing?
It would be deeply unfair to blame all of this on Gray – and her critics know this. There have been mistakes made across government. Some more experienced Whitehall figures are scathing about the idea that she is responsible for it all.
The deep disquiet about the winter fuel payment cut was not Gray’s fault. She was the senior figure who called a halt to some of the ruthlessness over Labour’s selection process – including calling out the treatment of Diane Abbott. Donations went through Starmer’s private office, not Gray. And she was widely credited with vastly improving Starmer’s relations with regional leaders and his female cabinet ministers, with whom there had been communication problems.
When things were going badly, the scapegoat was always going to be the person whose job it had been to make sure that things went well. As one veteran put it during a late-night chat at the Labour conference, it might not all be her fault, but it was her problem.
The lack of a coherent narrative was the talk of disgruntled MPs and staffers throughout the conference. When one special adviser turned up to a late-night drinks party in Liverpool carrying a comically large rucksack, his colleague joked: “What’s in the bag? Have you finally found our transition to government plans?”
In No 10, there is a feeling now that Starmer’s team will be much more united, less obsessed with internal politics and ready to refocus on the bigger picture. Their weak spot will be their inexperience, though McSweeney’s deputies, Jill Cuthbertson and Vidhya Alakeson, have both worked in Downing Street before.
McSweeney comes in with the goodwill of many key aides and ministers across government, though a lot of backbench MPs view him with suspicion. Now finally there is one team in charge, not two competing factions.
But there is also nowhere left to hide if this reset does not reboot the purpose of this government. And that purpose and vision is only ever truly down to one person to set and communicate: Starmer himself.
