Is removing Sue Gray as chief of staff fewer than 100 days into government proof that something has already gone very wrong with Keir Starmer’s premiership?
As the dust settles on the new Downing Street regime following the shock news of Gray’s departure on Sunday, the obvious answer is yes. Gray was brought into the Starmer team from her notorious role as a top civil servant with such fanfare and high expectations of her ability to get a grip on the machinery of Whitehall that her exit is a major blow. It does not reflect well on Starmer whichever way you look at it: either he was unable to resolve tensions in his team that would have enabled him to keep someone he deemed so crucial to his project, or Gray was the wrong fit from the start and he wasted valuable political capital trying to make something work that was always impossible.
But when I first saw the news, I was struck by something I’d heard a week before, in the unlikeliest of places to find insight into Starmer’s mind: Conservative Party Conference.
The insight came from none other than Michael Gove, one of the most prominent (and, indeed, divisive) figures over the last 14 years of Tory government, who last week began a new life away from frontline politics as editor of the Spectator. “We know from Starmer’s past that he’s made mistakes – but he has shown the capacity to learn from them,” he told the audience of an event on what we have learnt from Labour’s first (almost) 100 days. Gove cited the assessment of Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, on his progress: “It doesn’t look elegant, it’s not a cavalry charge. That’s because he’s walking across a minefield. It’s one step forwards, two steps back. A bit of shrapnel hits him, but he survives and he’s on that journey.”
At that particular moment, rather a lot of shrapnel appeared to be swirling around Starmer. Outrage over freebies had just entered its third week, with a lack of control over the government comms grid making it all too easy for Starmer’s critics (including, of course, every Conservative in Birmingham) to draw eye-catching comparisons between the PM’s acceptance of designer clothes, glasses and tickets to Taylor Swift and the axing of the Winter Fuel Allowance for all but the poorest pensioners. Similarly festering was the row over Sue Gray’s salary of £170,000 – more than the Prime Minister himself – which had set off another round of insider grumbling from restless Whitehall personnel frustrated by their own workplace issues, including lower than expected renumeration. As my colleague George Eaton put it: “A two-month-old government is at war with itself.” Far from smoothing out the transition from opposition to government, Gray’s involvement appeared to have blown it up, alienating different groups around Starmer and eating up goodwill among those who so recently had been full of optimism.
This may or may not have been Gray’s fault (we’ll have to wait for the almost-inevitable memoirs from her and Morgan McSweeney to be able to judge that one), but in a way that wasn’t the point. Mistakes had clearly been made. And while many Tories were celebrating the chaos in the new Labour government, Michael Gove was warning against complacence: “Nevertheless, Starmer will already be working out how to make sure that those mistakes are learnt from.”
Evidently, he was. Less than a week after those comments, Gray was gone – far sooner than even her critics expected. The assumption had been that she would be moved out before Christmas, not after just 94 days in the job. For context, it took six months of dithering and toxicity for Boris Johnson to sack (or, if you prefer, wait for the resignation of) Dominic Cummings after the revelations of his lockdown-breaking trip to Durham and eye test in Barnard Castle emerged.
Getting rid of Gray does not in any way mean that Starmer’s challenges are over. Putting his campaign director Morgan McSweeney in the top job solves the problem of having two power bases in No 10, but runs the risk of politicising the entire operation, while making it harder to achieve the kind of Whitehall reconfiguration considered vital for delivery of the five missions. But it does reveal once again that the “ruthlessness” associated with Starmer is not a figment of the imagination of political commentators.
I’ve just been reading Taken As Red, the new book by ITV’s deputy political editor Anushka Asthana on the build-up to Labour’s landslide victory in July. Published as the Prime Minister (we know now) was in the midst of deciding how to solve the dysfunction in his fledgling administration, it is peppered with examples of him coldly dropping people or embarking on brutal reorganisations when it’s clear things are not working. There’s the ousting of Jennie Formby as General Secretary of Labour as soon as Starmer was elected leader. Kicking Rebecca Long-Bailey off his front-bench months into his leadership on a pretext many find spurious. Demoting Annaliese Dodds to make Rachel Reeves shadow chancellor in the reshuffle that followed the 2021 Hartlepool by-election loss while shaking up his advisory team. (As George pointed out in yesterday’s Morning Call, “derided at the time as chaotic, the changes were ultimately deemed successful”.) And all the people who didn’t get the jobs they’d expected after the election – most notably Emily Thornberry, who was passed over for attorney general and left on the back benches, having served for 14 years in the shadow cabinet.
Elsewhere in Taken As Red, Asthana notes that while Starmer has close, long-standing friends to whom he is exceptionally loyal, these are people outside of politics. He doesn’t seem to do political friendships in the way virtually everyone else in Westminster does. Unlike most politicians who achieve high office, he seems coolly indifferent to being liked, focused only on moving forwards. The Sue Gray appointment was seen as a massive coup for Labour when it was announced; when it was clear it was not working as intended, Starmer cut her loose and moved on.
So does all this drama so early into a government show something has gone wrong? Undeniably. But the real question is what will Starmer learn from this early misadventure? And will he be able to avoid making the same mistake again?
