"It's a combination of hypocrisy, naivety and arrogance," says a former special adviser to Number 10. "There's a lot of exaggeration in politics, but I find this astonishing."
Sue Gray was always going to play a major role in the new Labour government's affairs, but the powerful civil servant turned government enforcer has already broken a golden rule of unelected political figures. She has become the story. The revelation that Sir Keir Starmer's chief of staff earns £170,000 a year - £3,000 more than her boss - and the ongoing rumblings about the series of gifts and freebies lavished on the prime minister and senior ministers have prompted former special advisers who once worked with her to complain about how Gray has gone from policing the ethics of high politics in Britain to overseeing what some have called double standards.
The special adviser (often known as spads) added: "Firstly, quite rightly, the Labour opposition came down hard on the Tories in government for perceptions of financial irregularities and self-interest, using words like 'sleaze' - that you did all that and somehow didn't think you would be held to exactly the same standards is just insane. Secondly, in the case of Sue Gray, she made her career and her name in government as the keeper of standards. It's really hard to understand how you don't have to worry about even the perception of the message her salary sends."
It is a sign of how much attention has shifted to Gray - and how fed up the Labour hierarchy appears to be with the apparent discontent leaking out of Downing Street about the situation - that Health Secretary Wes Streeting joked at a Labour Party conference event in Liverpool: "It's going to get worse before it gets better. Sue Gray is hiding Lord Lucan and shooting JFK and I can't even tell you what she's done to Shergar." He added sarcastically: "I don't know how we're going to recover from this, to be honest." It has not gone unnoticed that Gray, who accompanied Starmer to the recent north London derby between Tottenham and Arsenal, decided to sit out the first Labour party conference since 2009.
"She was a really toxic influence in government," says a second former Conservative special adviser. "When Starmer first hired her, there was a real sharp intake of breath from a lot of the spads who had dealt with her in government, and also from a lot of civil servants, who were generally too sensible to say anything about it. If you're Starmer, why would you walk in and immediately bash the team that helped you get into government and immediately bash the team that you depend on to get into Whitehall?"
"When she was in government she had a position that protected her - now she is much more vulnerable," the first special adviser said. "The way she has treated some of her colleagues in Labour means she has already made enemies and reduced her own political capital in the party. In difficult times you need allies."Number 10 says: "We do not comment on leaks or these types of reports about individuals."
Grey has of course been under public scrutiny before, but until she left Whitehall to join Labour she was widely regarded as a staunch supporter of objective decency and the politically neutral Civil Service. After a variety of stints in various government departments since the 1990s, she served as director-general of the Decency and Ethics team at the Cabinet Office between 2012 and 2018.
"I remember negotiating my salary with Sue in a very fearful way," the first special adviser explains. "We were treated in a rather arrogant way because we were told that government should be whiter than white and that it was a privilege to do the job and that you don't do it for the money. All of these things were told by Sue herself. Now if she did all of this with full knowledge of the facts, that is astonishing arrogance."
Gray conducted two inquiries into the Cabinet Office, the first into the 2012 "plebgate" affair, which led to the resignation of Andrew Mitchell as chief whip. The second was in 2017, into the conduct of then First Secretary of State Damian Green. After a spell in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Gray returned to Whitehall in 2021 as Second Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office.
Her most high-profile investigation came when Home Secretary Simon Case recused herself from looking into the "partygate" allegations, taking over the process to investigate whether then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson knew about social gatherings at Number 10 during the pandemic lockdowns. Her initial findings were published on 31 January 2022, with the full report - following an investigation by the Met Police - delivered in May that year to a devastating effect on Johnson's premiership.
"I've never seen any reason to doubt her impartiality when she's made enquiries as a civil servant," says the first adviser. "I've seen spads and ministers treated badly by her, but I've seen that as universal and I think Labour advisers in the new government would say exactly the same thing: that she's asked them to take pay cuts and not sign contracts quickly. That doesn't help the government run smoothly. Many advisers from the Cameron coalition era and later would say the same thing. The big question that's been added now is that Sue is happy to dish it out - perhaps for good reasons - but doesn't seem prepared to learn from example."
Number 10 says: "On remuneration, while we do not comment on staff reports, as has been made public, special advisers cannot 'authorise the expenditure of public funds or be responsible for budgets' under the Code of Conduct. As such, all decisions on the remuneration and conditions of special advisers are made by civil servants, not political appointees. The Special Advisers Board is chaired by a senior civil servant who is formally authorised to make all final decisions on remuneration."
In March 2023, Gray resigned from the Cabinet Office and was appointed Starmer's chief of staff in September, an appointment criticized by some Conservative MPs who questioned her impartiality over partygate. Gray, whose son Liam Conlon is now the MP for Beckenham and Penge, formally joined Labour.
"To be fair, she's worked in government for so long and she knows the tenure for these jobs is short, so she probably feels her salary reflects all those years of service," said a third former Downing Street stalwart. "But anyone who was really political would know that you shouldn't accept a higher salary than the prime minister. Maybe it's a power grab and it ties Starmer to her, because he would have to agree to it."
"Even Sue's appointment was a huge story because of the way it happened," says the first adviser. "Like it or not, Sue Gray is already a lightning rod and that has been true from the moment she decided to take the job to investigate partygate and she has gone on to become Keir Starmer's chief of staff. It is never a comfortable place for an adviser to be and it is absolutely the wrong place for an adviser to be. You cannot do the job as effectively if you are the story."
In leading the Propriety and Ethics team for so long, Gray also oversaw policy on donations, gifts and freebies. This raised the same questions that have resurfaced over the past two weeks since it was revealed that Starmer had accepted a series of gifts from Labour donor Lord Alli, and that Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson had also taken similar opportunities. There is no suggestion that ministers or Lord Alli broke any rules, but questions remain about public perception and political judgment.
"If people are not inherently political, they don't make the best political decisions," the third former special adviser explains. "Civil servants don't understand the party political culture and all that goes with it from the bottom up. The same goes for accepting gifts and hospitality as for salary. There was a strong feeling in Labour that because they haven't been in government for so long, they weren't at the front of the queue for gifts like concert tickets. It sounds crazy, but for them it feels like a reward for all those years of hard work. They feel like they deserve it."
"It is absolutely astonishing to me that she has not taken up the freebies on the Labour front bench," the second special adviser said. "It is hypocritical because she was responsible for checking the interests and conflicts of interest of ministers in the Cabinet Office."
That Downing Street sources indicated at the start of the party conference that Starmer, Rayner or Reeves accepting further clothing gifts suggests that while there was nothing improper about this arrangement, fears of public cynicism are finally being taken seriously. On the eve of the conference, Starmer told the Observer: "I've always said that the rules must be followed. What I was looking for [Boris] Johnson did not play by the rules." Asked about Gray's salary, he added: "I'm not going to talk about individual salaries for any staff member. I'm the one who runs the government. I'm the one who makes the decisions and I'm the one who takes responsibility for those decisions."
"The problem here is not Sue, it's Starmer's judgement," says the second spad. "She's already behaving in the Dominic Cummings mould, which I find really surprising, because she's witnessed [his behaviour] first-hand. She doesn't really understand what a chief of staff is. Sue is just someone who has created her own processes in a dark corner of Whitehall. And so that's the really crucial difference between what she did before and what she does now, is that she's a much more public figure. She can't hide."