What Sue Gray-gate says about Keir Starmer

In British politics the first order effect of any report into a past furore is always about how it impacts current party leaders.

So the various early inquiries related to the invasion of Iraq, for example, were not really about honestly learning from mistakes, but about the extent of the damage they would inflict upon Tony Blair. Equally, the public inquiry into the handling of Covid was most eagerly anticipated when it was supposed that Boris Johnson would still be in 10 Downing Street upon its publication, as his opponents looked for a political bomb to blow him up. Now he has gone it rarely gets talked about at all.

The Cabinet Office review into Sue Gray’s contacts with Keir Starmer and her intention to become his Chief of Staff is therefore not really or mainly about Sue Gray. It’s not really about Boris Johnson either, though some diehard supporters will spin its findings as being proof of a stitch-up of their man and try to use it to clear the way for his eventual return to high office. It is partly about the left-wing politicisation of the civil service in general but that is very much a second order talking point.

What it is really about is Keir Starmer knowing all along that Mrs Gray, the mother of the chair of the Labour party’s Irish Society, was an ideological soulmate and yet using her damning verdict on partygate to launch a vicious personal blitzkrieg on Johnson. And about him dangling a prestigious job offer before her when she was perhaps still in the thick of giving advice about Whitehall ethics.

According to a report in the Telegraph, a Cabinet Office review will conclude that Mrs Gray was in secret talks with Starmer while she was still working with its Propriety and Ethics Team that was giving advice to the Commons privileges committee investigation into Johnson. No wonder the chair of that committee, Harriet Harman, made a statement recently declaring that its work did not depend on Mrs Gray’s own findings on partygate. Because not only could any sense of depending on Gray have compromised the independence of the committee’s inquiry into Johnson, but it would also have led to some very difficult questions for Starmer.

Those questions still hang in the air: did this well-trained and ‘forensic’ legal mind contaminate and politicise the various independent investigations into the Johnson regime by secretly dangling a juicy reward in front of the civil servant at the heart of them? Aside from the matter of when formal talks with Gray began, at what point was she made aware of the general possibility of landing a dream post-civil service job with the Labour leader? And if all this is not proof of inquiry-tampering by Starmer, does it not at least give rise to a reasonable perception that this is what was going on?

By the time the final Gray report was published, did Gray have a vested interest in pleasing the Leader of the Opposition? If so, how could a man so well versed in the essential integrity and independence of legal processes have allowed that to happen?

Some Tory MPs – Lee Anderson come on down – may go as far as to suggest Starmer could have been out to nobble an inquiry in a similar way that associates of gangsters sometimes seek to nobble juries. That seems highly unlikely to me. But an almost equally disturbing and much more realistic interpretation goes as follows: priggish Starmer is so in love with the notion of his own integrity that he has ceased to ask himself whether any course or action is right or wrong, wise or foolish. If he, Keir Starmer, wishes to embark upon it then it has become axiomatic in his own mind that it must be the right thing. That would certainly fit in with the by-now blithe and untroubled way in which he has cast aside so many pledges and promises and with his outrageous and false suggestion that Rishi Sunak doesn’t want child molesters sent to prison.

For a putative and wannabe prime minister, such a tendency to be one’s own least-stern critic is alarming and arguably wholly disabling. The lifting of the lid into Starmer’s wooing of Gray may well give us an insight into the mindset of a self-righteous creep. It’s not about her, it’s about him.