A few days after Keir Starmer won his historic election victory, his chief of staff Sue Gray texted a friend, delighted at how quickly the new prime minister was settling in. “He was born to do this job,” she said.
Three months later, she was gone.
Gray’s exit on Sunday from her role as the most powerful adviser in the British government followed weeks of poisonous briefings about her high salary and alleged poor performance, and a stream of dire headlines dogging Starmer’s new administration.
She has paid the price for the storm of criticism engulfing Starmer over recent weeks, including over his acceptance of thousands of pounds worth of clothing from donors and free tickets to concerts and football matches — and the government’s failure to quell anger over planned spending cuts.
Seasoned Whitehall insiders have been shocked by how fast the new administration was unraveling, just weeks after such a huge election victory. One senior official said Starmer had been getting “a lot” of negative feedback privately about Gray, a former top civil servant, from Cabinet ministers and trusted aides.
Gray and Starmer discussed the situation and agreed something needed to change — and the chief of staff agreed to resign. “It was always going to be a tough ask of Sue — neither political by background nor a civil servant any longer,” the senior official said.
In her place the PM has installed Morgan McSweeney, his closest political aide and the mastermind of Labour’s historic election victory, to the most powerful position in Downing Street.
Starmer will be hoping that appointment — plus a wider reorganisation of his inner circle — will draw a line under a chaotic start for his new government that has seen his own poll ratings plunge.
A forthcoming book — “Landslide: The inside story of the 2024 election” — reveals new details of Gray”s ill-fated efforts to get the party ready for power, and the frustration she has caused internally since.
Picking the team
As millions went to vote in the election on July 4, Gray and Starmer huddled together inside their party headquarters in south London, drawing up what would be the first Labour Cabinet in 14 years.
The office was almost deserted. Most staffers were out knocking on doors to persuade voters to go out and elect Labour. As Gray talked Starmer through her recommendations for key ministerial roles, many of those lined up to take on Cabinet positions felt totally underprepared.
It had been Gray’s task to get Labour ready for power, and Starmer had faith that she was the right person for the job. He had recruited her in 2023 from the top of the civil service, where she had conducted the high-stakes investigation into lockdown-breaking parties inside Boris Johnson”s Downing Street.
No chief of staff could hope to know more about the inner workings of government — and Gray’s knowledge was invaluable to a Labour Party that had been out of power since 2010.
But senior figures in both the Cabinet and Whitehall were dismayed that she did not do more to prepare Starmer’s team for power.
Gray brought in her friend Waheed Alli, Labour’s wealthy election fundraising chair, to help. He worked on designing both the official grid of announcements and events for the first 100 days in power. He also helped design the organizational structure for Starmer’s team of special advisers inside No. 10 Downing Street.
But those first 100 days did not go to plan. It is not clear whether the plan changed after Alli drafted it, but he swiftly found himself at the heart of the furor surrounding his own donations of clothes and accommodation to Starmer.
Access denied
In the weeks leading up to the election, Alli also accompanied Gray in what were known as “access talks” in Whitehall. These meetings between the opposition and senior civil servants are intended to allow shadow ministers to give permanent government officials notice of their priorities. Ideally, the more detailed the talks are, the better to help a new government hit the ground running.
In previous years, access talks have begun as much as 18 months before polling day. Rishi Sunak — as is conventional — gave permission to allow Labour to begin the discussions with the civil service in January 2024.
But Labour was reluctant to get involved. Officials in some departments were surprised not to be in more demand. The talks were often minimal and took place in extreme secrecy. Shadow ministers were not even allowed to discuss the matter with each other.
When the election was called, Starmer’s team was “caught out by the timing” and scrambled to intensify the talks with civil servants, one person familiar with the matter recalled. “We did accelerate the pace,” one of the ministers now in the Cabinet said. “We had to rapidly move through things.”
According to the book, Gray was among the senior party officials most reluctant to see ministers engage in comprehensive access talks. The hold-up was frustrating for front benchers. Another senior minister confessed that their access talks consisted of just one 30-minute conversation with a senior civil servant.
“We were told not to speak to other teams about what we were doing,” the first Cabinet minister said. “We were at one level saying, ‘we’ve got to be ready for the election at the same time as the local elections in May,’ but then we were also saying, ‘there’s no need to have access talks.’ Those two things were totally contradictory.”
The excuse that the party bosses gave to frustrated underlings was that they did not want to look like they were taking victory for granted or be seen to be “measuring up the curtains.”
Staffers got the impression that Gray did not trust the civil service to keep Labour policies confidential. The fear was that sensitive details could be leaked. “There was a nervousness around that, from Sue’s point of view. [The concern was] not without merit … but it was more important actually that if we did win the election, we were ready to go,” the minister said.
Gray had other problems. Persistent reports of tensions with election campaign director McSweeney boiled over into a flurry of stories in the newspapers about a power struggle at the heart of No. 10.
The denials from Labour insiders were consistent but never wholly convincing. One described the reports as “codswallop” — not quite the same as stating them to be untrue. Others said the stories were “a bit baseless” and merely “gossip.”
After taking office, Gray found herself in the firing line for endless complaints.
“You always get these figures who get built up within the administration to be larger than life personalities,” one senior party official said. “It’s inevitable that there’s always someone who becomes the lightning rod figure for decisions that are ultimately made by the leader. People find it easier to blame the member of staff than they do to blame the leader themselves when they get a decision they don’t like.”
That leader is Starmer — and he’s shown with repeated reshuffles of his team in the past that he’s prepared to act swiftly when required. “He’s tough,” one close aide quoted in the book recalled. “If something’s not working, he fixes it.”
McSweeney is now in the Downing Street hot seat, and his first job will be to get a grip on the internal sniping.
“It will be no good for anyone if the ill-discipline continues,” warned the first senior official quoted above. “Morgan will need to be clear about people shutting up, and brutal if they don’t. The PM won’t get any more do-overs.”
“Landslide: The inside story of the 2024 election”, by Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth, will be published by Biteback in November.
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