‘Could you write a piece,’ my colleague wondered aloud, ‘saying come back Jeremy Corbyn: all is forgiven?’ Ha ha ha, said I. No. We most certainly are not there yet. And it is hard to conceive of any sequence of events, up to and including an asteroid strike on SW1 or a Day of the Triffids style mass blinding, which would leave us thinking that a return of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership would be a step in the right direction.
And yet and yet. Keir Starmer has been squandering at quite startling speed the goodwill of those of us (I know that will not be all Spectator readers) who had some goodwill towards him in the first place. The resignation of Sue Gray will be spun, no doubt, as Sir Keir showing ‘grip’ and ‘steel’. It strikes me as a prime instance of him showing quite the opposite.
There was nothing corrupt about it. There was nothing illegal
He came into government with no apparent plan for what to do, and tumbled straight into the first elephant trap available, at the bottom of which he has been digging and yelping ever since. His senior aides – seniorest among them being the supposed ethics and propriety expert Sue Gray – failed to make clear to him that accepting every freebie that came his way was not just tacky and silly but a colossal hostage to fortune. They were too busy briefing against each other to focus on that aspect of their job, perhaps. Or perhaps they thought it should have been bloody obvious already.
Now, in the old formulation, Sue Gray has ‘become the story’ and so must step nobly aside so as not to be a ‘distraction to the government’s vital work of change’. And whose fault is it that she became the story? In part, we can suppose, it’s her rival and now replacement Morgan McSweeney. In part, it will be her own fault. But most of all, it will be Keir Starmer’s. He created the conditions for his senior courtiers to fight like ferrets in a sack, failed to rein them in or provide clear lines of command, and now finds himself, ho ho, reshuffling his team to ‘strengthen his Downing Street operation ahead of marking his first 100 days in office’.
It was odd that she was in that role in the first place. That is by no means a negative reflection on her capabilities. I don’t doubt (though lots of people now seem to) that she is a whizz-bang man-manager, a deft and dedicated public servant, and a silkily experienced tugger and twister of the levers that control the machinery of the civil service. It seems perfectly plausible to me that she was worth every penny of the salary that everyone made such a fuss about. The point I make is simply about what some people like to call ‘the optics’.
If you look back to the balmy days of Partygate, when the wheels were falling off Boris Johnson’s clown car, you will remember how Sue Gray – of whom most of us had never previously heard – was presented to the world. It wasn’t just that she had all the positive qualities I mentioned. It was that she was described as a sort of Whitehall version of Elliot Ness, a figure of towering probity and impartiality, a sea-green incorruptible, someone so far above the petty factionalism of Westminster politics that the conclusion of her inquiry might as well have been handed down from Mount Sinai. She didn’t leak. She didn’t brief. When we thought of her, I think we subconsciously pictured her in a marble gown rather than an ordinary trouser suit.
And – pace Boris – her very thorough report does not seem to have been any sort of a stitch-up. Indeed, damning though its conclusions may have been, she adhered closely enough to her fact-finding brief that, in not expressly condemning the prime minister, she gave him the opportunity to claim that he had been exonerated. That she immediately afterwards hopped into the passenger seat of Keir Starmer’s battle bus, though, was not a good look.
There was nothing corrupt about it. There was nothing illegal. You can, if you squint a bit, see how someone can go from being utterly impartial and disinterested in their work as a civil servant one day to being a fully paid-up member of Team Labour the next.
But you do have to squint a bit, and most people won’t bother. It had the same vibe to it, if you ask me, as Shami Chakrabarti conducting a rigorously impartial external investigation into claims of antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party immediately before taking a seat in the Lords as a Labour peer.
The problem, I think, is a baked-in self-righteousness which is a particular affliction of the centre left. Blair had it too. Once you satisfy yourself that you’re a person of probity – that you conducted your inquiry wearing one hat but that you take a new job wearing another; that your taking gifts from a friend won’t compromise your decisions when it comes to policy; that you know exactly where those Chinese walls are – you are impatient, even tetchy, with those who aren’t prepared to take that on trust.
That’s Sir Keir’s problem. And it remains a problem whether Sue Gray is the nightclub bouncer outside his office or touring seaside resorts as ‘envoy for the regions and nations’. For someone who can spend two and a half grand on glasses, he still has a lot to learn about optics.
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