Who will dress Keir Starmer now?

It is worth upholding the stuffy point which should have prevailed at the start. It was always improper and unethical for Sue Gray (formerly in charge of Propriety and Ethics in government) to leave the civil service to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. In her beginning was her end. Carrying with her all her inside knowledge, she was almost a gamekeeper turned poacher, inspiring mistrust among career officials without winning the respect of the much rougher political crowd. To understand why she was unsuited to her job, one has only to imagine how the thing would look the other way round, with Morgan McSweeney being suddenly announced as, say, cabinet secretary. The more one hears about the Gray imbroglio, the more it seems related not only to her failure to get the necessary work done, but also to the role of Lord Alli. Ms Gray was close to Lord Alli, who gave £10,000 to the campaign of her son, Liam Conlon, now a new Labour MP – his second biggest handout after that to Sir Keir. As well as being Lord Bountiful, Lord Alli seems to have got the impression from her that he was charged with effecting Labour’s transition programme from opposition to government, assisted by the former Conservative MP Nicholas Boles. Hence his Downing Street pass. Critics say he should not have been and that the transition dismally failed. Ms Gray invented 12 management lines, all reporting to her, none of which survived contact with the enemy. Lord Alli was also encouraged to give all his generous donations directly to the party, rather than distributing them among favourites, but the Gray/Alli axis seems to have withstood this.