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.’
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