There is one woman who Labour donors are even more keen to meet than Rachel Reeves, even though it is now Labour lore that tickets to the party’s business day with the shadow chancellor sold out faster than Taylor Swift tickets. That woman is Sue Gray. Everyone wants to meet the power behind the throne.
Gray was once a fabled Whitehall figure, whose reputation as the guardian of government ethics was unmatched among civil servants but barely known by the general public.
That changed when she became the public face of the investigation into Partygate – the flagrant breaking of Covid rules by officials under Boris Johnson, and by the prime minister himself. Then, in March 2023, Gray sensationally departed Whitehall to become Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.
The election is not technically in Gray’s wheelhouse and in the next five weeks she will take a back seat to Morgan McSweeney, the strategy guru who is the only senior staff member to rival Gray in influence. Since Rishi Sunak announced the election date, Gray has been focused primarily on the second round of access talks with the civil service for when – if the polls are right – Labour forms the next government.
But the separation of government and politics is not so simple. In recent months, Gray had joined the election planning meetings led by McSweeney and the campaign coordinator, Pat McFadden. Gray and McSweeney still speak daily, and there are areas of overlap, including the party’s handling of the row around the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott.
“Sue doesn’t see things through the eyes of voters – she hasn’t ever needed to,” said one Labour figure on the political wing of the operation. “She’s the chief of staff but Morgan is running the show for this bit”.
Until Gray’s arrival, McSweeney retained a near-unrivalled closeness to the leader. Starmer’s original chief of staff, the ex-MP Jenny Chapman, was his biggest champion, but her style alienated some MPs and she was moved to sit in the shadow cabinet as a peer.
Since then, Starmer had struggled to find a chief of staff who would grasp his instincts and gel with his tight-knit and fiercely political team, and as polls began to suggest a large Labour majority, there was a strong sense that the appointment would also need a huge amount of institutional knowledge about how to operate in government, which had been lost in 14 years of opposition.
Sue Gray’s appointment was a political earthquake in Westminster, particularly in Whitehall, because it seemed such an extraordinary move for the civil service lifer, famed as the chief inquisitor into ministerial misdoings and at the centre of the investigation into Partygate and Johnson. But once people got over their initial shock, the decision was easier to understand for those who knew her.
“She cares a lot about the exercise of power,” said one ex-government official. “She was an incredibly powerful figure who has made choices to ensure that kind of exercise of power continues. I never thought she was a Labour sleeper, but I did think she was someone interested in advancing her own views.”
Senior figures in the party have expressed surprise at how quickly Gray has morphed to be able to speak for and take decisions on Starmer’s behalf. At an event last year, Starmer was about to answer a question when a voice piped up from the sidelines: “Do you mind if I take this one?” The speaker was Gray.
Shadow ministers have often been surprised by her arrival at the most innocuous of meetings and she has been highly visible in Westminster, at shadow cabinet book launches and thinktank parties, striking up conversations with MPs and researchers.
While Gray waited the required six months to start her new role, her reputation preceded her. “I think there was a definite feeling in the party that she would sort all the shit out, she would be the person to sort all your personal XYZ frustrations, and that was inevitably going to end in disappointment,” one MP said.
“Everybody thought Sue would be the answer to all of their problems,” one aide said. “But she’s not superhuman; she can’t do everything.” There are still widespread complaints of painfully slow decision-making at the top of the party.
But her reputation as an inquisitor has helped Gray immensely when it comes to influence on junior staff and MPs. One junior shadow minister explained: “An aide called me and asked if I wanted to move to a different team, and I said no. Then the shadow secretary of state called me, and I said no. But then Sue Gray called, and you don’t say no to Sue Gray.”
Because of her experience running the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team, she is expected to be particularly interested in the standards regime in government, which Starmer has long considered to be failing.
Gray is Starmer’s political fixer and mediator, who has set about smoothing dysfunctional structures within the leader’s office and repairing relations with key figures who felt alienated – though no one believes that task is anywhere near complete.
But she has made it her business to improve relations with two key groups that felt alienated by the leader’s office, according to senior sources. The first is shadow cabinet ministers, especially those bruised by negative briefing, such as Louise Haigh, Lisa Nandy and Angela Rayner, of whom she is a particular champion.
The second is Labour’s metro mayors, whom she has been meeting regularly for a charm offensive and who are crucial to one of Labour’s first intended bills, the Take Back Control Act on devolution.
There have been efforts to more closely include senior politicians in big decision-making. “The boys have previously been very sneering of involving MPs in any decisions at all,” one shadow cabinet minister said, using the description that many Labour MPs apply to the small coterie of male aides around Starmer who have a taste for aggressive political tactics.
Her mode of operating has not been confined to diplomacy and she has been prepared to lay down the law. Two Labour officials said Gray had alienated some staff by launching a leak inquiry into a Guardian report on the party’s plan to drop its £28bn climate investment commitment. “Her leak inquiry leaked. That wasn’t good,” one official said.
Yet it has not held her back from letting staff know when she is unhappy. Sources said she was concerned about the way in which Abbott’s case had been mishandled, and her frustration over the briefing against the MP was made clear to the inner team.
There is a well-formed view that Gray will be the most influential figure in terms of jobs – and there are already jitters among long-serving aides and shadow ministers who fear they will quickly find themselves unemployed, though Starmer is not intending a major reshuffle of his shadow cabinet – at least, not immediately.
Even among the most senior staff, there is barely anyone who has been promised a particular role in government, and the majority are in the dark about the future.
“The only thing anyone in the party can talk about is what job everyone is getting in the next government, and the unspoken thing is, they know Sue is watching them and seeing if they will make the cut,” a shadow cabinet adviser said. “Probably the reality is that hardly any of them will – they would be eaten alive.”
Her hiring-and-firing powers are likely to extend to the civil service, with the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, thought to be particularly vulnerable, as a result of what was felt to be his poor handling of her departure from the civil service.
Officially, Gray has three priorities in her role. The first is to be Starmer’s ambassador within the party, the second is to oversee the process for decision-making, and the third is the practical preparations for government. Work has started on about 20 bills, some in significantly more detail than others. Access talks with civil servants are in their second round.
Key to the early reforms will be the creation of cross-departmental mission boards, which will have responsibility for driving through progress on Starmer’s five missions, the bedrock of his intended premiership. They will focus on economic growth, the NHS, crime and justice, affordable green energy and improving opportunity.
But her other job is to spot disasters that could derail the early days of government – the FT reported that it was dubbed “Sue’s shit list” – such as the collapse of Thames Water, council and university bankruptcies and a battle over public sector pay.
She has already been doing crisis management in opposition, getting closely involved in the party’s response to the Israel-Gaza conflict and attempting to smooth relations with trade unions after a row about workers’ rights.
Gray is not only interested in the mechanics of government, but in policy. “She has been painted as this very Whitehall figure, but she’s very political,” one colleague said. “She’s not the voice of caution. If anything, she has been telling shadow ministers: ‘You own this issue, you can legislate, make your mark, don’t be too timid.’”
Those policy interests were first revealed in Starmer’s biography, written by Tom Baldwin, for which Gray agreed to be interviewed. Her proposal for the party to look at the wider use of citizens’ assemblies was picked up by the national press and quickly disavowed by the party, though it gave an illuminating insight into Gray’s character.
Far from being a Whitehall creature, she is invested in active citizenship and inspired by how consensus was built in Ireland by citizens’ juries on equal marriage and abortion. But among Labour staffers, there has been little discussion of the substance and more on whether it was appropriate for the interview to take place.
The first some aides heard about it was from Baldwin himself. “It’s a book about Keir,” said one. “It feels a bit odd for her to have done it.”
In the interview, Gray said she was working on the creation of a unit at the centre of government that would be “focused purely on mission delivery and transparency of performance”.
After 5 July, if Gray makes it to Downing Street, she will arrive with a reputation already well established among civil servants, many of whom describe having been terrified of Gray’s investigative skills when she was head of propriety and ethics at the Cabinet Office.
“She used to have these cats,” says one official. “Somehow we convinced ourselves they were her familiars, and whenever they would walk into a room we would all stop talking.”
One senior ex-official said Gray was spoken of in “hushed tones” across Whitehall. “There were a number of things where Sue’s view became the received wisdom. It became indispensable. The team she ran had, effectively, a veto on ministerial appointments, a big say in reshuffles, in disputes, resignations. She didn’t always seek closeness with the principals, but she knew exceptionally well how to exercise influence.”
David Lidington, the former chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, recalled an impeccable professional during his time working with Gray. “She had a fearsome reputation among MPs and ministers, especially among those who hadn’t met her. She always gave the impression that she hated a minister being high-handed or blaming officials who couldn’t fight back. She hated bullying or hectoring.”
Gray is not from the typical civil service mould. One senior Labour figure said Gray and Starmer had connected because of their acutely similar backgrounds. Both are from working-class families – Gray’s were Irish immigrants, and she did not attend university, but went straight into the civil service.
Both Gray and Starmer have a deep connection to Northern Ireland, where Starmer was human rights adviser to the Policing Board, and where Gray took a career break and ran the Cove bar in Newry during the Troubles with her Portaferry-born husband, Bill Conlon, a country singer.
But although her time as a border-town barmaid is crucial to her origin story, perhaps more revealing of her personality is her time back in Northern Ireland years later, where she was permanent secretary of the Department of Finance and coveted the top job there but failed to be appointed.
Her response was to give a deeply critical on-the-record interview to the BBC. “Why didn’t I get the job? I’m not sure I’ll ever quite know, but I suspect people may have thought that I perhaps was too much of a challenger, or a disrupter. I am both,” she said. “And yes, I wanted to have change.” That little-known interview is an astonishing insight into Gray’s character and perhaps the best predictor of her future direction – those were not the words of a secretive, cautious mandarin.
After Gray returned to the Cabinet Office, where she would conduct the career-defining Partygate report on the conduct of Boris Johnson and other senior figures during the pandemic, she found herself “bruised”, according to one colleague, by the public exposure and with little help or protection from the incumbent government.
Government sources have denied that Case blocked her progression to a new Whitehall permanent secretary role. But it was now that Gray decided it was time to leave government. When Starmer then came calling, the self-described radical decided to make a handbrake turn and cross over, a huge personal risk, but one that offered the chance to become one of the most influential figures in the land.
“She will run the government,” one close former colleague said. “She has a huge advantage, that she knows the personnel and she knows her way round Whitehall. And if she gets Olly Robbins [the former Brexit negotiator] as her pick for cabinet secretary, those two will be in charge of the country.”
