The Sue Gray saga casts doubt on Keir Starmer’s managerial chops

THE CASE for Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister ran something like this. He may not be a great orator and he might not have a grand vision for how to remake Britain, but he does know how to run a public-sector bureaucracy. Before the election in July he traded on his record as a one-time director of public prosecutions who focused on “getting the boring stuff right”—digitising old documents, say, or listening to the junior staff who knew where efficiencies could be made. After the showboating and internal warfare of successive Conservative governments, in a country with creaking public services, a super-administrator in Downing Street would be worth having.

Faith in this story of Starmerism has been sorely tested. On October 6th, just 93 days after becoming prime minister, Sir Keir parted ways with Sue Gray, whom he had appointed as his chief of staff. Ms Gray was a hire in his own image: a former senior official in the Cabinet Office recruited in 2023 to ready the party’s embryonic plans for government.

Those plans turned out to be extremely patchy. To take one notable example, having campaigned for office on a promise to clean up Westminster, the new government’s own ethics reforms have been conspicuously absent (even as Sir Keir and his colleagues have been accused of accepting inappropriate gifts of concert tickets and clothes from party donors). Labour’s thinking on education policy, health-care reform and taxation appears undernourished. Perhaps the most elementary day-one task—fixing the contracts and pay of the dozens of special advisers who serve as ministers’ eyes and ears in Whitehall—was mired in infighting between Ms Gray and Sir Keir’s other aides.

Sir Keir has now acted. Ms Gray has been replaced as chief of staff by Morgan McSweeney, a long-time aide who orchestrated first his campaign for the Labour leadership and then the party’s landslide election victory in July. Two deputies, Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson, will report to Mr McSweeney.

The decision to change a faltering team is right. But the churn in personnel raises doubts about Sir Keir’s managerial competence. Successful premierships are characterised by stability at the top: Jonathan Powell, Sir Tony Blair’s chief of staff, served him continually in opposition and government from 1995 to 2007; Edward Llewellyn, David Cameron’s bagman, served for a similar 11-year tenure. In contrast, Mr McSweeney is returning to a job he performed in 2020-21, before being succeeded by Sam White and then Ms Gray.

Other positions in Downing Street are in limbo or unfilled. On September 30th Simon Case, the cabinet secretary—the country’s most senior civil servant—said that he would be stepping down for health reasons. The replacements for the outgoing national security adviser and ambassador to America have yet to be found; a promised minister for inward investment has still not been announced.

The government’s shaky beginning also invites questions about its ability to improve the wider machinery of government. Sir Keir’s theory of management held that a calmer, less conflictual approach to the civil service would work wonders. Since coming into office, ministers have reset relations. Controversial headcount caps were publicly ditched. Mandates to work in the office 60% of the time were relaxed: new job adverts from several departments now suggest 40% attendance is acceptable. Pay deals awarded above-inflation rises of an average of 5%.

Improving relationships was necessary in order to get more out of civil servants, thinks Alex Thomas of the Institute for Government (IfG), a think-tank. But if winning over Whitehall hearts was a good priority for the new government, it is not sufficient. There are plenty of signs that the civil service is struggling.

One is the damaging level of churn. Over one in ten civil servants quit or swapped departments in 2022-23, higher than at any point since 2011 apart from immediately after the covid-19 pandemic. The resulting loss of institutional knowledge and confidence shows up in rising dependence on outsiders: the government spent £3.4bn ($4.2bn) on management consultants in the last financial year, 57% higher than five years earlier, according to Tussell, a data company. Central-government departments used more than the rest of the public sector combined.

There is an awful lot of low-hanging fruit in Whitehall for the government to pick. The IfG has listed 20 “essential” civil-service reforms it would like Labour to undertake—things as jaw-droppingly simple as giving hiring managers access to performance reviews of internal candidates or ensuring new starters don’t wait months for security clearances and laptops. Efficiencies of this sort once seemed tailor-made for a technocrat like Sir Keir. Perhaps they still are. But the government has had a very wobbly start. How the new Downing Street team does will show how much the blame for that lay with Ms Gray or with the prime minister himself. ■