It’s not been the best start to the week for Sue Gray. Reports that there are divisions among Sir Keir Starmer’s top team have put the Prime Minister’s chief of staff under the spotlight. The Mail on Sunday splashed on claims made by Whitehall sources about Gray ‘thinking she runs the country’. An insider claimed that the former civil servant ensures even top mandarin Simon Case asks her permission to speak to the PM. Meanwhile tensions between Gray and Starmer’s adviser Morgan McSweeney are thought to be running high, and the reported friction between the pair has been dubbed the ‘battle between Gray’s girls’ gang and McSweeney’s boys’ brigade’. Good heavens…
And now ex-culture secretary Nadine Dorries has waded into the matter, taking to the pages of today’s Daily Mail to opine on Starmer’s top staffer. First lamenting the end of the ‘nascent friendship’ Dorries said her and Gray once shared, the former cabinet minister was quick to blast Sir Keir’s chief of staff for being a ‘slick operator’, adding: ‘She hoodwinked me and, I believe, she has done the same to Keir Starmer.’ Dorries then appeared to suggest that there might be substance to the rumour that Gray was a spy – which the ex-civil servant has denied – writing that ‘Whitehall is packed to the rafters with former security agents now working in senior civil service roles’. Talk about cloak and dagger…
And never one to miss a PR opportunity, the former cabinet minister was quick to reference a scene from her book The Plot – where the Boris Johnson ally claimed that Gray had unsuccessfully asked the former Prime Minister for the position of Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office. ‘An embarrassed Boris pretended not to hear her request,’ Dorries penned scathingly. Ouch…
Signing off with a warning for the current PM, the ex-culture secretary concluded:
Starmer should recognise the ominous early signs – his staff unsettled, briefings and counter-briefings and repeated links to the media. It will only get worse for him if he doesn’t get a grip soon, because his decision to seemingly allow Ms Gray such a disruptive degree of power in No. 10 is indicative of a weak PM with poor judgement. Is there anything he can do? Well, the House of Lords is an option, and I have no doubt that’s where Sue Gray will be heading some day soon…
Not that Nads would be bitter, of course, after narrowly missing out on the same fate herself…
Comments