Labour has a secret reformer and her name’s Sue

Even in an age that has seen Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell sell out the Royal Albert Hall, Ed Balls reborn as a star of daytime television and Nadine Dorries self-identify as political historian, it is still surreal to hear of spontaneous, rapturous applause greeting the arrival of a career civil servant in a room full of strangers. But Sue Gray, late of partygate, is no ordinary civil servant — indeed, no longer a civil servant at all.

Sir Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff reported for duty this week a woman liberated. In a brief speech to her new charges at Labour headquarters on Tuesday she spoke of her relief that her six difficult months of purgatory were over. Then, grasping intuitively the Labour