The Scroll

12/8/24

Morning, time to get back at it.

If you’re tracking what’s going on with this power struggle at the heart of government between Chief Of Staff Sue Gay and Senior Advisor Morgan McSweeney, this might be of interest to you just as a run down and a bit of an example of the unelected power that the civil services has. The above is Dominic Cummings talking about her in 2014 and the below are a few extracts from a BBC article in 2015.

Sue Gray works in the Cabinet Office, where she has the asking-for-trouble job title of "Director-General, Propriety and Ethics Team". Her job is to adjudicate on whether rules have been broken by officials, ministers and special advisers. In practice, she is also a fixer for Sir Jeremy Heywood, head of the civil service.

Ms Gray's influence is astounding. She ranges widely: part of her job is signing off memoirs (including by elected politicians) to check they have not revealed anything unhelpful. Officials from right across government have stories of her intervening on everything from their pay and conditions through to what documents they may or may not publish.

Ms Gray is notorious for her determination not to leave a document trail. When Labour wants to propose someone for a peerage, they ring her on the phone. She then gives them an oral "yes" or "no" as to whether they are likely to get through vetting. The party accepts her verdicts, but there are no records and she never explains herself.

Even when a document trail exists, Ms Gray is enthusiastic about keeping it a secret. We know that she advised special advisers on how to destroy email (by "double-deletion") to thwart FOIA requesters. She did not advise them on the requirements of the code on public record-keeping. We also know, via the Freedom of Information Act, that she kept no log of why, how or when she destroys documents (contrary to that guidance)

As you may remember she was the civil servant in charge of the -impartial- investigation into party gate, the scandal that finished Boris off. But then agreed to join Starmer’s government as his chief of staff, as you’d expect this put a lot of pressure on Starmer at the time to explain the rather bad optics of this. Seems this is certainly someone who’s been around a long time - she joined the civil service from school, no university - and at least due to her work as head of the Propriety and Ethics team, will know where the bodies are buried for individual MP’s and Political Parties alike. On that theme, of Irish heritage, she also has a interesting time away from the civil service in the 80’s running a pub called the Cove Bar on the Irish border. Certainly a capable individual, but she remains unelected and therefore needs to know her place if we’re going to continue playing democracy.

One this I’ll say about this and it’s a ‘once you see it’ thing that you can’t get away from, Laura has obviously seen this too. ‘Communities’ is a codeword that means exactly what you think it means. It enables messaging ostensibly for a nationwide audience to speak directly to a small part of it.

For the above see yesterdays post about the friend enemy distinction and anarcho-tyranny. If you missed the weekends essay type posts because you have a life, I think they were decent, so here they are.

That’ll do for today. Enjoy your week.