Sue Gray’s departure matters. But not in the way some may assume. Gray became famous because of three things: her Partygate investigation under Boris Johnson, her recruitment to Keir Starmer’s team in opposition and for having once run a pub in Northern Ireland. It all turned her into just about the only British civil servant whom people beyond Whitehall might recognise on the news.
It was therefore predictable that her fall from power would also be depicted in personality terms. Sure enough, Gray’s original ousting in October was attributed to a turf war with Morgan McSweeney, now her successor as Downing Street chief of staff. Or to the fact that Labour special advisers were disgruntled over their pay differentials. Gray’s final exit this week was also reportedly triggered by Starmer’s frustration that she had not started work on the job to which he demoted her five weeks ago.
There is likely some truth in all of this. There was too much internal hurt, anger and mistrust around Gray. But this misses the larger, less personalised reason why her leaving is important. More than 18 months ago, a senior Labour official put it succinctly. Starmer had recruited Gray “for one sole purpose, preparing Labour for government”. Unlike Starmer himself, and unlike most of those in line to be his ministers, Gray knew not just how Whitehall worked, but how it ought to work better. Her job was to ensure that the new government hit the ground running.
Instead, the government hit the ground stumbling. The July election meant parliament was slow to get into its stride, resulting in a stop-start summer and a lack of political direction. Universal winter fuel payments to the over-65s were then clumsily abolished, an amateurish error. There were easily avoidable pratfalls over gifts and freebies, which ministers foolishly tried to defend. All this bore little relationship to the change that Labour had promised and for which the public had voted.
It was very damaging. But it could all have been foreseen. It certainly should have been far better handled. But not even this was what brought Gray down. The cause of her fall was that Gray’s idea of how government ought to work was felt to have wilted under the realities of office. In particular, it did not satisfy Starmer himself, as he gradually became accustomed to having his feet under the Downing Street desk.
Gray’s failure, according to insider critics this week, was that she prepared Labour for government in exactly the wrong way. She did not accept the reality that, in modern politics and government, the centre will always want to shape what is done at departmental level. She instead encouraged ministers to trust the Whitehall machine, and to run their departments with their own goals and their own departmental narratives. It was this fundamental difference of approach that led to her being forced out.
By October, Starmer had had enough. There seem to have been two main reasons. First, Gray did not prioritise the government’s so-called missions – the yardsticks by which Starmer wishes Labour to be judged when the next election comes round. All of these – clean energy, highest G7 growth, NHS reform, educational opportunities and safer streets – are cross-departmental projects. So is the unofficial sixth mission: control of borders. Only the centre of government, Starmer told a meeting of the cabinet last week, can ensure that departments work together to deliver them.
Starmer’s second reason is that, in reality, it is he, more than any minister, who has to answer to the public for the success or failure of the government’s priorities. His desk is where the buck stops. There is simply no other way. Like it or not, it is the prime minister – in press interviews, in parliament and when the next election comes – who has to make the case for the government’s departmental priorities.
This is why, in part, it was Starmer himself who went to the Cop29 summit in Baku this week to announce new commitments to cleaner energy goals. No 10 believes that the government’s big themes, on which its re-election hopes will depend, need to be led from Downing Street and by the prime minister himself. The decision to go to Baku directly reflects what has changed with Gray’s departure.
It will now be followed by others. Starmer has spent a lot of time abroad in the government’s early months, largely because the diary required his attendance at a succession of international gatherings, of which next week’s G20 summit in Brazil will be the next in a long line that started with the European political community summit at Blenheim Palace in July.
Expect, though, before Christmas, to see Starmer starting to play a much more central role on domestic policy, too. There are at least two such events in the imminent Downing Street grid now. At least one of them is likely to involve making a case for NHS reforms of the kind that the health secretary, Wes Streeting, announced this week.
This is the context in which stories suggesting the “return of the Blairites” to Downing Street must be seen. For once, such tales are not exaggerations or scare stories. This time, they are simply true. The Blairites – or some of them – are indeed back. Their return does not embody a change of political direction for the Starmer government. More, it consolidates Starmer’s willingness to grasp that Labour’s project will not get far in the Trumpian 2020s unless it draws on experienced and politically savvy people who are willing to challenge shibboleths.
The appointment of Tony Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell as national security adviser from the start of December is the most eye-catching example of this. With Starmer refocusing on domestic policy, Powell is likely to carry a lot of the international heavy-lifting. But the return as director of policy delivery and innovation of Liz Lloyd, possessor of one of the driest senses of humour within the old Blair inner circle, is, if anything, more crucial. Most of the mission agenda will rest on her shoulders.
None of this is to claim that Starmer’s in-flight rebuilding of his governmental engine is without problems, still less that it will succeed. But it should be seen for what it is: as a very large change moment that makes coherent sense of Gray’s departure. Back in the summer, Starmer was still engaged in the “phoney war” early stages of his attempt to refit Labour as a plausible government for the transformed 2020s political landscape. Now he has set his course. Even now, it may all have happened too late to undo the damage that the government inflicted on itself in the early months. Gray’s departure, though, marks the moment when the pilot was dropped and the project decided to get serious.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
