Keir Starmer’s first few months in office has not been a picture of cloudless stability – with a summer of riots, stories of infighting, and a shortly-won reputation for dreary spending cuts. And now, with the news that his chief of staff Sue Gray has resigned, the sense that this is a chaotic and poorly managed administration will hardly abate. Gray – who is taking on a new role as an “envoy for the regions and nations” – said in her resignation statement that it had “become clear to me that intense commentary around my position risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change.”
Gray will be replaced by Morgan McSweeney, who moves in to run No 10 from his former role as Starmer’s head of political strategy. In August, Westminster became “fixated” – as my colleague George wrote last month – with the narrative that Gray and McSweeney were locked in a power struggle. This quickly spiralled into a much broader problem: Gray, it seemed, had actually been at war with far more Labour staff than that. (“It’s not Sue vs Morgan; it’s Sue vs everyone” was the common refrain.) Special advisers were especially incensed to learn that they were earning less than their Conservative forbears.
In this context, the BBC’s September revelation that Gray was being paid £170,000 (a higher salary than the prime minister) was an explosive moment. Words like “unsustainable” and “untenable” began circulating – Gray had caused so much PR difficulty for the government that she would surely be gone by Christmas, so went the prevailing analysis. As George wrote at the time, the frequency of vituperative briefings about Gray made the two-month-old government look as though it was at war with itself.
In the short-term Labour will have to weather the minor storm her resignation will cause: the appearance of chaos and instability in the heart of government, which is the very thing Starmer had promised to end after years of internecine Tory bickering. But in the medium term a serious problem – the tension between McSweeney and Gray, and the tension between Gray and the wider staff – has been resolved. The big question now is whether McSweeney is up to the task of running No 10, or indeed, if anyone is.
