The most remarkable feature of the Sue Gray saga is not how much the Downing Street chief of staff earns, but how little Britain’s prime minister does. Keir Starmer gets just £166,786, which is about £3,000 less than Gray. But then she gets less than many permanent secretaries, not to mention the consultants and lawyers Whitehall is crawling with these days. Besides, as we are tired of hearing, Starmer gets dazzling benefits in kind.
A second feature of the saga is its mess. Just 12 weeks into the rosy dawn of a new Labour era, Downing Street is enmeshed in a spat more typical of a regime on its last legs. Starmer has spent his time in office telling Britons they face a shambles, requiring a clampdown on public spending. The new army of special advisers – approximately 70-strong – is duly being paid a relative pittance, but one that has been fixed by a boss who decided to take a thumping pay rise. To put it mildly, this suggests poor political judgment. As one insider joked, Gray is the only pensioner likely to do better under Labour.
Fixing the machinery of Downing Street is the first crucial job of a new prime minister. Starmer has hit the ground stumbling. It is customary for those closest to the leader’s ear to be a circle of trusted friends ready to act as his alter ego. This was true back in the days of Thatcher and certainly of Tony Blair. When Blair came to power, his senior aide Jonathan Powell said to expect “a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system”. What he meant was a downgrading of the traditional civil service hierarchy, one of permanent secretaries with the cabinet secretary at their head. Instead, government was conducted more informally, from “the sofa”, as Kenneth Clarke dismissively described it.
This had benefits. Under Thatcher, the civil service acted initially as a brake on change, but she eventually gathered loyalists round her and bent the system to her will. Although she still listened to advice, as when in 1988 she did a U-turn on NHS privatisation. Under Blair, media management from the sofa overwhelmed policy. Foreign Office advice on Iraq was suppressed, and Blair made his greatest mistake with the invasion of that country. Since then, the balance in Downing Street between politicians and officials has become ever more informal and sometimes fractious. It reached its nadir under Boris Johnson and his maverick aide Dominic Cummings.
A measure of the disruption was that internal pressure succeeded in evicting Cummings, but when dissent occurred under Liz Truss, it was politics that evicted the head of the Treasury, Tom Scholar. In the case of Gray, it seems that an early victim of her boisterous style will be the cabinet secretary, Simon Case. She is already reported as controlling access to security briefings, appointing close allies as civil servants and pushing her pet building projects. This may be fine if you can keep it secret, but not if those round you keep leaking.
Gray was a civil servant who became a political adviser. They are different professions. Civil servants have spent their careers working together, with Downing Street and the Cabinet Office at the peak. They are supposedly discreet suppliers of truth to power. Political advisers are rarely used to big organisations. They are mostly the beneficiaries of party patronage, thinktanks and the murky world of lobbying. Some fit in; others do not.
The most recent grit in this machine has come from the growth of the No 10 Policy Unit, staffed by special advisers. Its proclaimed purpose is to keep Whitehall to the manifesto straight and narrow. But it inevitably cuts across similar units in departments, also staffed by advisers. It was war between the two top units – and Cummings’ reported desire to have Treasury advisers dismissed – that forced Johnson’s chancellor Sajid Javid to resign. So critical is this relationship in the realm of economic policy, that Starmer’s No 10 unit has apparently been downgraded. It will reportedly be just “a point of contact” on economic policy, “more like the nervous system than the brain”. We await the outcome with interest.
It is easy to adapt Tolstoy and say that every unhappy Downing Street is unhappy in its own way. But unhappiness starts at the top. Starmer must now support Gray to the hilt. She must at least have her own colleagues loyal to her – and to her confidences. At the same time, prime ministers have clearly strayed too far in the direction of Blair’s Napoleon. Second opinions must get through to a leader making decisions, even if the civil service must ultimately obey and deliver. Dissent should not take the current form of media leaks and disloyal gossip.
There has to be virtue in a well-established architecture of public administration. So much of this has now broken down. That is why there must be a tilt back to the tradition of a formalised and articulate civil service, with the cabinet secretary at its apex. The satire Yes Minister portrayed civil servants as subjecting the ambition of ministers to pragmatic reality. It had its virtues, and the civil servants did not always win. It is worth a repeat.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
