Keir Starmer has said he and the former senior civil servant Sue Gray knew and followed the rules over her appointment as his chief of staff but admitted frustrations at not being able to defend the hiring while it was scrutinised by the Whitehall watchdog.
Giving details about the two calls he held with Gray, who will join his team in the autumn, the Labour leader said he had known her for a number of years and called her a “phenomenal woman”.
He told LBC radio: “I was looking for a chief of staff and the conversation I had with her, which was a short conversation, which is, ‘I’m looking for a chief of staff, if you were to leave the civil service, is this something you might consider?’
“Because I knew the rules, she knew the rules. And we left it at that. I then didn’t speak to her again, that was the extent of it.”
Starmer said things got tricky when the plan to hire her leaked in March 2023, prompting Gray to tell the civil service about her contact with Labour and then stepping down from her senior role. “I gave her a call to make sure she was all right and to find out what she was doing,” Starmer recalled.
Starmer said he was “confident in saying there was no breach of the code”.
It followed the results of an investigation into Gray’s departure that were published by the government earlier this week. Jeremy Quin, a Cabinet Office minister, said there had been a “prima facie” breach of the civil service code – meaning an apparent contravention of the rules based on first impressions.
Gray’s defenders said there was no detail provided to her about the investigation process, who would make a ruling about a breach of the code, nor the mechanism for any appeal.
The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), which scrutinises post-Whitehall appointments, also said it had been given no evidence that Gray breached the code, though added that was a matter for the government to decide.
Starmer said he was frustrated at not being able to defend her or the process under which she was hired because they both had to wait for Acoba’s ruling, which came last Friday and gave permission for her to start her new role in the autumn.
“That was frustrating for me because it is actually a very short story,” he added. “I know what the rules are, Sue knows what the rules are, that is why we only had a very brief conversation along those lines.
“I wish the committee hadn’t said, ‘Don’t tell anyone until we’ve determined’. But they’ve got their own process, which we respected. And of course they’ve said that nothing was wrong.”
Starmer added his contact with Gray about a job came “months after” her Partygate report and that the last time he saw her before that was at a funeral several years ago.
