There’s no getting away from the fact that Sue Gray’s potential appointment as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff is extraordinary, in every sense of the word. It’s hard to think of a similar move by a civil servant to the opposition.
Civil servants do go and work for political parties – some in senior roles, like Dan Rosenfield for Boris Johnson, or Jonathan Powell for Tony Blair. Both, ironically, were chiefs of staff.
It is the move directly from one to the other that causes concern. Some of that concern is justified, but most isn’t. There are few people who understand the complexities of this more than Gray herself. In a now different life, she would be the one advising the prime minister if it happened on her watch.
There are legitimate concerns. She has been at the heart of government for all of the 13 years the Conservatives have been in power, and has also dealt with some of the most politically sensitive issues in that time. When the prime minister asked her to conduct the Partygate investigation, he did so because the cabinet secretary had just had to step down from that role because of a conflict of interests. Johnson needed not only a safe pair of hands, but someone whose reputation for impartiality and integrity was beyond reproach. Gray was the obvious choice.
None of that has changed. The job of Acoba, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, chaired by Eric Pickles, the former Conservative cabinet minister, is to look at potential appointments and see how conflicts can be resolved. Often these are financial, where a minister or civil servant had some role that could be advantageous to business, such as bidding for government contracts or benefiting from government policy. Here the question is more complicated, but legitimate concerns are not unreasonable.
Permanent secretaries already must serve a mandatory three-month block on outside appointments. Civil servants, at all levels, know that what they see and do in their day job is confidential, often covered by the Official Secrets Act. Acoba will now grapple with working out how to provide the assurances the government will legitimately ask for. The prime minister would be wise not to look like a football manager who has just lost his star striker to a rival and is now trying to block the transfer.
What is disappointing, though perhaps unsurprising, is the speed at which those who do actually know better, and who worked with and respected Gray, are now layering on accusations of an 18-month-long leftwing plot over Partygate.
It was the former prime minister who handed her that particular poisoned chalice, and it was minister after minister who took to the airwaves lauding her unimpeachable integrity to deflect from awkward questions about what they or the prime minister knew.
She did what she was tasked to do as an impartial civil servant – establish the facts. Those facts were then accepted by the prime minister. To suggest that somehow she was playing the long game to get rid of Johnson, with an eye on this job, is for the tin hat brigade. Instead, allies of the former prime minister, and indeed now he himself, are using the appointment to try to damage the credibility of the investigation conducted by the privileges committee, where, if found guilty, he could face some significant political consequences.
As the row rumbles on today, that’s the thing to bear in mind: the threat to Johnson is the reason for this faux outrage.
Dave Penman is general secretary of the FDA union
