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When Sir Keir Starmer first approached Sue Gray early last year to be his chief of staff, he believed the veteran civil servant would bring her long Whitehall experience to Labour’s preparations for government.
He hoped she would be a poacher-turned-gamekeeper, able to break through Britain’s sometimes turgid bureaucracy and teach Labour politicians — after 14 years in opposition — about the machinery of government.
Starmer’s defenestration of Gray on Sunday, after barely 90 days as UK prime minister, was an admission that the plan had failed. Gray had been criticised by colleagues for slow decision-making, micromanagement, and for being insufficiently political.
The arrival of Morgan McSweeney as her successor marks a striking U-turn in approach. As the architect of Starmer’s leadership victory and July’s general election landslide, McSweeney is hugely strategic. “We need hard men in there,” said one cabinet minister on Monday.
Yet he has no experience of working in government, let alone in such a powerful job.
“This won’t fix everything overnight,” admitted one well-placed Labour figure. “It’s not the perfect set-up but it is better than what we had before.”
Recent coverage of Gray, whose salary was higher than Starmer, had portrayed her as an all-powerful control freak. “Who’s our real PM?” asked the Daily Mail in September alongside a photograph of her with US President Joe Biden.
John McTernan, a former Labour aide, said Gray’s departure showed that “everyone is disposable in politics”, no matter how senior.
“Being chief of staff is one of the hardest jobs in politics . . . there will always be monkeys in the cheap seats throwing peanuts at you,” he said. “But none of the staff are bigger than the boss.”
In early 2020 Starmer won the Labour leadership and soon ditched his leftwing team in favour of more centrist, Blairite advisers.
As opposition leader Starmer repeatedly switched chiefs of staff — from McSweeney, to former Treasury aide Sam White and then Gray.
As the dust starts to settle, there remain questions about whether the new set-up in Downing Street will be enough to end the Labour government’s teething problems.
Critics accused Gray of hoarding decisions, creating bottlenecks in government and presiding over a Downing Street culture that was overly reactive and short-termist.
One Number 10 colleague said Gray had refused to work with some people, blocked advice to the prime minister and failed to prepare the party adequately for government. “However bad it sounded from the outside, multiply it by 100,” they said.
Another person in the Starmer inner circle said: “She made enemies for herself pretty much everywhere in a variety of different ways.”
Yet some Labour officials question how McSweeney, respected as a skilled fixer, will improve strategic thinking and policy implementation. His previous spell as Starmer’s chief of staff in opposition only lasted a few months. One Labour figure said: “There are questions that remain unanswered. This was probably a necessary thing to do, but has it solved everything?”
One ally of McSweeney said he was wrongly portrayed as an obsessive psephologist who was only interested in the mechanics of winning elections rather than government.
“People really underestimate how interested he is in ideas. He’s not seen as a technocrat but he has been talking to other centre-left administrations around the world about ideas, discussing things like ‘What should a radical housing offer look like?’” the person said.
By instinct he would want to take on Whitehall and bend it to the will of the Labour party rather than let the civil service dictate what the administration should do, that person said. “He is a smasher and a breaker by temperament rather than a moulder and manager.”
Gray’s departure on Sunday came against a backdrop of plunging approval ratings and a damaging “freebies” scandal. The internal reshuffle has reassured some newly elected Labour MPs. “Anything that brings renewed focus is helpful,” said one.
Starmer still has to appoint a political secretary to liaise with backbench MPs — one suggestion is former work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth, who lost his seat in the election.
In a brutal twist it was Simon Case — who is being pushed out as cabinet secretary — who was dispatched to negotiate the terms of Gray’s departure. She will now have a role as an envoy between Downing Street and the regions and nations, the terms of which role are not yet clear.
Alastair Campbell, former Downing Street head of communications, said it was unfair to portray the situation as a shambles. “These are all recoverable but you cannot make too many mistakes in government . . . I hope that this is the reset that is needed,” he told the BBC.
