As well as being paid more than the Prime Minister, it seems Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff is getting more press attention these days too. It now transpires that Sue Gray will not be attending Labour’s conference this week, following bad briefings over her pay packet. Rather than attend the Liverpool love-in, Gray will stay away from the party faithful and, instead, apparently prepare for a United Nations conference next week.
The latest round of malicious leaks aimed at Gray revealed Starmer’s top staffer is on a £170,000 salary – £3,000 more than the Prime Minister himself and higher still than the pay packet of her Tory predecessor. The finding led to outrage among party advisers, many of whom were rather disappointed to discover they are now being receiving less money than what they were in opposition. Not quite what they’d expected Sir Keir’s ‘change’ agenda to lead to, Mr S can imagine.
Those in the know about Gray’s wage certainly weren’t pulling any punches over the issue. One source remarked to the Beeb that: ‘It was suggested that she might want to go for a few thousand pound less than the prime minister to avoid this very story. She declined.’ An insider slammed the former civil servant as an ‘increasingly grand Sue’, while another remarked scathingly to the Sunday Times: ‘Sue Gray is the only pensioner better off under Labour.’
So, is Gray’s absence pre-planned or a response to recent events? She attended the annual meet this time last year. ‘It’s probably the sensible thing to do,’ says a Labour aide. ‘If she’d come it would have become a media circus.’ However, Gray’s absence is unlikely to silence her critics – instead she is one of the main topics of conversation at the bash. Out of sight, but not out of mind…
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