Charles Moore Charles Moore

Who will dress Keir Starmer now?

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issue 12 October 2024

It is worth upholding the stuffy point which should have prevailed at the start. It was always improper and unethical for Sue Gray (formerly in charge of Propriety and Ethics in government) to leave the civil service to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. In her beginning was her end. Carrying with her all her inside knowledge, she was almost a gamekeeper turned poacher, inspiring mistrust among career officials without winning the respect of the much rougher political crowd. To understand why she was unsuited to her job, one has only to imagine how the thing would look the other way round, with Morgan McSweeney being suddenly announced as, say, cabinet secretary. The more one hears about the Gray imbroglio, the more it seems related not only to her failure to get the necessary work done, but also to the role of Lord Alli. Ms Gray was close to Lord Alli, who gave £10,000 to the campaign of her son, Liam Conlon, now a new Labour MP – his second biggest handout after that to Sir Keir. As well as being Lord Bountiful, Lord Alli seems to have got the impression from her that he was charged with effecting Labour’s transition programme from opposition to government, assisted by the former Conservative MP Nicholas Boles. Hence his Downing Street pass. Critics say he should not have been and that the transition dismally failed. Ms Gray invented 12 management lines, all reporting to her, none of which survived contact with the enemy. Lord Alli was also encouraged to give all his generous donations directly to the party, rather than distributing them among favourites, but the Gray/Alli axis seems to have withstood this.

The Gray saga illustrates a growing problem. Such is the concentration of power in 10 Downing Street that the rivalries within it constantly explode – Dominic Cummings and Nick Timothy being the classic examples from the Tory era. It has become axiomatic that the prime minister’s office should control everything. Obviously a prime minister without control becomes a cipher. But things have surely gone too far. Government departments and cabinet ministers are demoralised because they have lost the independence which the British constitution once gave them. This makes government much harder to run, yet the only remedy proposed is ever more power for the centre. Currently four of the five top jobs in 10 Downing Street are political, not Whitehall appointments. Even the PM’s principal private secretary, Ninjeri Pandit, comes from an NHS data job rather than a corridors-of-power one. The government also lacks a cabinet secretary. The ubiquitous Dame Sharon White was approached but wisely declined.

One question being piteously asked by all those smartly accoutred Alli cats in the cabinet is: ‘Who will dress us now?’ They face the grim possibility that they will have to pay for their own clothes from now on. I wonder if Rachel Reeves could help them in time for her Budget. There might be something to be done with tax allowances. I believe that when John Major, who had no money, became prime minister, it was felt that he did not dress smartly enough for the role, so he was taken along by Jeffrey Archer to be kitted out at Austin Reed. Officials seeking to regularise the situation studied the tax rules and concluded that a proportion of the Major wardrobe could legitimately be written off against tax because his clothes were, in part, required for his work. A figure was hit upon and Mr Major was safely imprisoned in the double-breasted suits of the period which he never liked much. Presumably this tax allowance still exists and is bigger than in the Major days. Does Sir Keir know about it for himself? Will he feel it should extend to all ‘customer-facing roles’ in government?

At the party to launch his book, Unleashed, on Tuesday night, Boris Johnson revealed – or, perhaps one should say, claimed – that it had been made possible (publishers being notoriously mean about parties) only because another writer had unexpectedly returned his advance for an unwritten book, freeing up HarperCollins to afford the champagne. This author was Sir Keir. He had been paid to write one of those books on the future of Britain which sadistic publishers enjoy inflicting on the reading public. He had returned £18,000. I could see from the face of the book’s editor as Boris made this revelation that there was at least a grain of truth in this story. Poor Sir Keir, rich Boris.

On Monday, I attended two commemorations of the 7 October anniversary, one in parliament, one private. What were we commemorating? The BBC said it was a ‘raid’ (an Arab Entebbe?) and an ‘unprecedented offensive’. The FT described the Hamas attackers as ‘militants’ and allowed the crime to be called heinous only in inverted commas. I had thought we were commemorating the largest anti-Semitic atrocities since 1945. But perhaps BBC Verify will prove that I was wrong.

I recently wrote elsewhere about the new government regulations which require every single owner of every single hen, budgie, pheasant, cassowary etc to fill in a form for a national register. Fail to register one solitary bird and you are committing a criminal offence. The state is aspiring to the divine omniscience revealed in Matthew Chapter X: ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.’ Worried bird owners have come to me with a further question: ‘What happens when one of our birds dies? Must this too be registered?’ Presumably, yes. Probably there will be a ‘duty of candour’ imposed upon the owner to report to the authorities (‘It is with much regret that I must inform you that our beloved Booted Bantam cock, Lord Alli, has passed away’), and a Defra death notice issued (fee, at least £45).

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