What I make of Sue Gray

I am at a bit of a loss to understand the hoo-ha about the civil servant Sue Gray. She has been offered the role of Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and many Tories suggest this implies that her investigation into those Downing Street parties may not have been wholly neutral. Where have these Tories been living for the past three decades? Of course it wasn’t wholly neutral. Almost the entire civil service – certainly in Westminster – loathes the Conservative party. Its members are, instead, hip and interminably liberal internationalist social-justice warriors. Sue Gray is probably among the moderates.

One of the most important causes for the comparative failure, so far, of Brexit, has been the virtually universal opposition to leaving the EU from the people charged with seeing it through – the civil service. In 2019 a disgruntled (and necessarily anonymous) civil servant told the Sunday Times that he estimated the proportion of Remain supporters among his colleagues at ‘well over 90 per cent’.