Keir Starmer has thrived, over the past few years, by being a bit boring. Every day, I fancy, he wakes up in the morning, and after he has finished sanding his face and arranging his hair with Araldite, solemnly addresses the mirror and promises himself: no unforced errors. He probably has a list of don’ts: don’t in a moment of absentmindedness call for a national strike; don’t demand the eradication of the state of Israel; don’t promise to tax the rich till the pips squeak; don’t appear in the same hemisphere, let alone same photograph as anyone with a grey beard. Geese routinely walk unstartled across his path. His big strategy for winning the next election so far has been just to look bland and solid and sensible and let the Tories get on with flailing around in their pit of sleaze and recrimination.
So the appointment of Sue Gray to be his chief of staff strikes me as a very rare thing indeed from the Leader of the Opposition: which is to say, an unforced error. I don’t say this because I think, for a moment, that Sue Gray wouldn’t make a jolly good chief of staff. She has long civil service experience. She has a modestly steely way about her, a reputation for being quietly methodical and a well-evidenced resistance to bullying and bull-baloney of all sorts.
But what people have noisomely taken to calling ‘the optics’ are a problem, and optics – in an age when the lie is halfway to Yakutsk before the truth has got its boots on – are about 80 per cent of politics these days, whether we like it or not. Immediately after news of the appointment came out, I thought: what a weird thing to do. This, I thought, will suddenly give the Tories in general and the Borisites in particular a readymade retrospective attack line on the partygate inquiry. And, lo, sure enough, the following day’s Daily Mail splashed with pictures of Keir Starmer and Sue Gray, asking in big shouty letters: ‘Is This Proof The Partygate Probe Was A Labour Plot?’, and Jacob Rees-Mogg apparated to call the investigation a ‘leftwing stitch-up’ by a ‘socialist cabal’.
Optics – in an age when the lie is halfway to Yakutsk before the truth has got its boots on – are about 80 per cent of politics these days
It scarcely seems necessary to rehearse the ways in which all this misrepresents the truth. On her original appointment to inquire into partygate, which was made by, um, him, Boris Johnson himself told parliament that Sue Gray was a figure of unimpeachable integrity. When she made her report he accepted its findings of fact and apologised in general terms for what he insisted were unwitting errors on his part – which is hard to square with his outriders’ current view that it was a smear by a conspiracy of closet Marxists. And the baton in this supposed ‘left-wing stitch-up’ has now been passed to a privileges committee with a Tory majority.
The factual findings that Sue Gray made in her report – the vomit, the suitcases clanking with wine, and all that stuff – have not, so far as I know, been contested one tiny bit. The details that have subsequently come out of this endless investigation – such as the then PM laughing that ‘this is probably the most socially un-distanced gathering in the UK right now’ – have done nothing but bolster the modest and mandarin-like case that she made. And it’s from exactly that Tory-dominated committee that such details have emerged; along with the judgment that there’s very strong reason to believe the then PM knowingly misled parliament. Some socialist cabal. Some stitch-up.
But the details are too long ago and too boring for most people to remember. They remember Sue Gray, vaguely, as one of the former Prime Minister’s executioners (what brought him down wasn’t even partygate, in the end, but that’s also lost in the fog). They see that she has accepted a prominent new job with the Leader of the Opposition, and they read a giant headline like that one, and they remember watching The Manchurian Candidate. They won’t, most of them, think anything so eye-rollingly silly as that it’s a socialist cabal. But they will think, I suspect: that’s a bit too bloody cosy by half.
And it is, a bit, isn’t it? There’s a school of thought on the right that loves nothing more than to whang on about the Elite Establishment Woke Blob that has captured most of the supposedly neutral institutions of government and is working behind the scenes with the Labour party to tear down our national traditions, forcibly change our pronouns and install Ursula von der Leyen as head of state. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) This school of thought loves to pose its powerful and monied representatives as scrappy outsiders fighting against the establishment.
Nonsense though this may be, it seems to fly. And having a senior civil service mandarin who was involved in an intensely politically freighted inquiry transition effortlessly into a senior role in the Labour party is a gust of wind beneath its wings. Never mind that the last government has spent much of its time stuffing supposedly neutral institutions with political placemen and prime ministerial chums, the Lords with party donors, and has done favours right left and centre for the wealthy and well-connected. Never mind that the Labour party hasn’t been in a position to do anything like that since the glory days of Tony Blair (when, admittedly, it did). Never mind that traffic from the civil service to politics is generally less dodgy than traffic in the other direction.
The optics are all. As nicely suited Sir Keir knows, it’s not enough to be innocent of the charges laid by your enemies: you need to look innocent of those charges too, even to the most inattentive eye. There’s a school of thought that Sue Gray’s appointment was a cunning trap to make the Conservatives start talking about partygate all over again, but I think that’s a subtlety too far. Appointing her wasn’t a sin, but from where I’m standing it looks like an error.
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