Labour’s woes run far deeper than Sue Gray

‘We will stop the chaos’ of the Tories and bring back ‘stability’ to the UK. With those words back in May, Keir Starmer launched Labour’s General Election campaign.

It was a pitch that clearly thrilled much of the political and media class at the time. Politicos and pundits talked up the promise of a ‘competent’ government, of getting the adults back in the room after the supposedly juvenile antics of the Brexit and Boris years. In the words of one op-ed, ‘No-Drama Starmer’ was set to steady the UK ‘with his brand of dull competence’.

Starmer’s Labour is not exactly as advertised, is it? Dull, yes, but hardly competent. After fewer than 100 days in office, Labour has served up an administration that is just as chaotic as anything the Tories managed. It has been engulfed by endless reports of ministers’ love of free gifts from generous donors and corporate lobbyists, stories of rampant cronyism and above all of bitter, petty infighting between rival factions in Starmer’s top team.

And now that infighting has claimed its first victim in the shape of Starmer’s key adviser and chief of staff, Sue Gray. It was announced over the weekend that she is to step down from No10 and take up a newly created, part-time role as ‘an envoy for the regions and nations’. Whatever that is – and no one seems sure – it’s not a promotion (although it may come with the sweetener of a spot in the House of Lords).

In many ways, Gray’s departure is hardly a surprise. Having made her name as the author of the Partygate report that helped see off Boris Johnson as PM, the former civil servant has been the subject of countless leaks and unflattering news reports for weeks now. It’s been claimed that she controlled access to Starmer, even over security briefings. That she had a hand in the fishy-looking appointments of Labour supporters to senior civil-service positions. And, most damaging of all, that she took a higher salary than her boss, Starmer, despite being advised not to. As far as Labour is concerned, this much vaunted behind-the-scenes fixer had become a magnet for negative, front-of-house publicity – so much so that she had to stay away from last month’s party conference. It was pretty clear from Starmer’s and Labour’s perspective that she had to go.

The fact that many expected Gray to depart after months of less-than-flattering headlines shouldn’t detract from the significance of her ousting. She wasn’t just any old Labour staffer. She was key to Starmer’s project, if he can be said to have one. Gray effectively personified the PM’s own technocratic vision. Known as the bureaucrats’ bureaucrat, she was the walking and talking embodiment of his managerial ethos.

Indeed, from the moment she was officially appointed as chief of staff in the autumn of 2023 – after several months of legal wrangling over her departure from Whitehall – Starmer and his media cheerleaders hailed her competence, efficiency and managerial nous. ‘Sue will lead our work preparing for a mission-led Labour government’, declared Starmer in June last year. ‘She brings unrivalled experience on how the machinery of government works and is a woman of great integrity.’

One of the many gently gushing features published at the time claimed that Gray would prepare the party for government, that she would allow Labour’s grown-ups to do what the Tories had signally failed to do – namely, to ‘deliver’ on its promises and ‘get things done’. Another piece claimed Starmer and his team were ‘smitten’ with ‘the career civil servant’. So smitten in fact that Labour announced her appointment with the kind of fanfare you’d expect from a football club unveiling a new star signing, complete with a glossy photoshoot.

By the time of the General Election, centrists’ excitement over the managerial promise of a Gray-powered Starmer government reached fever pitch. The Guardian talked her up as the level-headed, ruthlessly efficient power behind Starmer’s throne. The Financial Times anticipated a newly ‘simpatico’ relationship between the government and civil service, after the two had butted heads under the Tories. Apparently, with Gray and Starmer at the helm of a new Labour government, Britain was set to be in competent, sensible, grown-up hands once again. As former BBC and now LBC pundit Andrew Marr put it in the immediate aftermath of Labour’s victory, ‘For the first time in many of our lives, actually Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability’.

Just a few short months on, and the claims being made for Starmer’s managerial restoration look delusional. The process- and rules-focussed jargon of technocracy, long parroted by Starmer, Gray and other members of Labour’s top team, now sounds empty. For all their talk of ‘delivery’, of ‘change’, of ‘getting things done’, their government has so far proven incompetent and incoherent. It has promoted a thoroughly miserable vision of Britain’s past, present and future, and pushed through unpopular and harsh policies, such as a cut to the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. Each spirit-crushing announcement has been interspersed with tales of ministers’ enjoying countless free gifts, from trouser suits and designer specs to box seats at the football.

However, those Labourites who think Gray’s departure will magically revive this seemingly already exhausted government are sorely mistaken. Those investing their hopes in the appointment of centrist apparatchik Morgan McSweeney as her replacement are even more so. Labour’s incompetence and incoherence don’t stem from the over-promotion of any one apparatchik. No, they are a product of the emptiness of Starmer’s Labour, the absence of any overarching philosophy or programme that might guide or make sense of its policymaking. All that we’re left with are empty slogans like ‘change’, ‘change begins’ and ‘delivery’ – and tedious office politics.

Labour’s problems run far deeper than Sue Gray. Her elevation was only ever a symptom of the emptiness at the heart of the Starmer project. Its chaos and incoherence shows that technocracy is no substitute for an actual political vision.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.