Shades of Gray: what does appointment say about Starmer?

The row over Partygate investigator Sue Gray’s appointment as chief of staff for the Labour Party has further intensified, with political pundits suggesting Keir Starmer’s reputation is at risk.

Cabinet Office minister Oliver Dowden said in a written statement to the House of Commons on Tuesday that the government would “consider next steps” after Gray “chose not to” speak to the investigation into the details of her departure from Whitehall. He “heavily implies” that she broke the Civil Service code, said The Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter, Madeline Grant – “but stops short of saying it explicitly”.

Labour denies that it approached the senior civil servant for the role while she was still investigating the Partygate scandal in Downing Street, while her allies say she is facing “a political witch hunt”. Starmer insists she is cooperating with the “normal process”.

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What did the papers say?

“For years – long before she shot to fame as the Partygate inquisitor – Sue Gray’s name was a byword for integrity on Whitehall,” wrote political editor Hugo Gye for the i news site. “Her sudden defection to Labour after secret talks with Sir Keir Starmer came as a surprise, given the risk of undermining her own reputation and that of the Civil Service as a whole.”

Her “outright refusal to cooperate” with Cabinet Office staff investigating her departure is “a still bigger blow to the idea that she represented an ideal of doing government by the book”, he added.

“If – as seems almost certain – Ms Gray did open discussions with Sir Keir’s team while still employed by the Civil Service, and failed to tell her bosses, it is a clear breach of the rules,” Gye said.

This raises constitutional questions, said The Telegraph’s Grant. “For a senior civil servant to seemingly engage in secret meetings with the Leader of the Opposition, and then refuse to explain her actions, seems little short of extraordinary.”

Gray “seems to have shown a remarkable lack of judgement and integrity”, she added. At this stage, “it would be astonishing if Labour were allowed to proceed with the appointment”. But whatever happens next, “the damage is done”, as Starmer “pitched himself as a man of honour and integrity”.

The crux of the issue, said Patrick O’Flynn in The Spectator, “is Keir Starmer knowing all along that Mrs Gray, the mother of the chair of the Labour Party’s Irish Society, was an ideological soulmate and yet using her damning verdict on Partygate to launch a vicious personal blitzkrieg on Johnson”. Additionally, there’s offering her the job “when she was perhaps still in the thick of giving advice about Whitehall ethics”.

Starmer has “built his leadership around being a man who follows procedure – ‘Mr Rules’ as one shadow cabinet colleague described him”, said Chris Mason and Nick Eardley at the BBC. “If the rules weren't followed – that reputation could be undermined.”

What next?

The “big moment in this story” is likely to be the final report from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), which will determine if Gray broke any rules, said Mason and Eardley.

Starmer “wants a new chief of staff to get his party ready to take power”, they said, but so far she has been unable to start the job and “it could be a while before she does if Acoba says there should be a cooling off period”. It cannot block her appointment, but it can delay it or impose limitations.

“Gray’s supporters believe that the investigation, which they claim is politically motivated as she had not worked in a sensitive role for five years, is designed to put pressure on the government’s appointments watchdog to delay her starting the new job,” said The Guardian. Allies believe she is facing a “political witch-hunt”, the paper said, adding that government sources denied the move is “personal”.

The story is “to my eyes, a load of old nothing”, wrote Stephen Bush for the Financial Times’s Inside Politics newsletter. Gray is “no friend of transparent government”, and her report on Partygate “went out of its way to find grounds to produce as favourable a document as Boris Johnson could have hoped for”.

The row is “taking oxygen and attention from Starmer breaking his tuition fee promise”. In many ways, said Bush, “this row shows how Starmer has been lucky in his opponents thus far”.