Labour says it is ‘utterly ludicrous’ to claim hiring Sue Gray means Partygate report was biased – UK politics live

Good morning. Conservative MPs are furious this morning about the news that Sue Gray, the civil servant who led the Partygate investigation, has been poached by Labour to work as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. It is not that unusual for civil servants, who have to be impartial, to go to work for political parties, where, by definition, they are not. The most prominent example is Jonathan Powell, who left a senior job at the Foreign Office to become Tony Blair’s chief of staff two years before an election that Blair seemed certain to win. Gray is following his example, and presumably she hopes the comparison holds. Powell lasted 10 years in Downing Street, and was one of the most influential figures in that administration.

But there are some differences, which do raise legitimate questions about the appointment. Gray was at permanent secretary level, making her more senior than Powell was. At one stage she was the head of propriety and ethics at the Cabinet Office, which means she knows more about ministers’ secrets than almost anyone. And she oversaw the Partygate investigation into Boris Johnson, which contributed to his downfall. The Cabinet Office is concerned that she may have accepted the job before notifying the advisory committee on business appointments and yesterday it said it was “reviewing the circumstances under which she resigned”.

Looking ahead, there are concerns that in the future she might use confidential information she has to benefit the Labour party. But there are plenty of people who do jobs that give them access to privileged information, and then change jobs or careers but continue to respect the obligations of confidentiality from their previous employment. Civil servants are no different.

The more outlandish, wacky and conspiratorial concerns about the Gray appointment this morning involve looking behind, and asking whether this means Gray was biased against Johnson all along. This theory has ended up on the Daily Mail front page.

As Jessica Elgot and Peter Walker report in our overnight story, Johnson’s allies are now trying to argue that the Gray appointment means the whole Partygate scandal was bogus, and that the Commons inquiry into claims Johnson misled MPs about it should be abandoned.

Related: Boris Johnson allies furious as Keir Starmer hires Sue Gray as chief of staff

Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, and a former chief of staff to Ed Miliband, has been giving interviews for Labour today. She told the Today programme that it was “utterly ludicrous” to suggest the Labour appointment discredited the findings of the Gray report. Powell said:

The suggestion that somehow this [appointment] colours Sue Gray’s independent and impartial reports into Partygate and all those other matters are really utterly ludicrous.

She wasn’t the one wheeling the suitcases of booze into Number 10. And the prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, and most of his acolytes at the time were at pains to tell us what a formidable and impartial and independent civil servant Sue Gray was.

It is also worth pointing out that no one has provided any evidence to suggest the facts or findings in the report were flawed. At the time, many in Westminster felt Gray had, if anything, been soft on the prime minister, for example by declining to investigate in detail reports that his wife, Carrie, hosted a party with loud Abba music in their private Downing Street flat on the day Dominic Cummings resigned.

There will be much more on this as the day goes on. We are getting a lobby briefing too, and MPs are debating private members’ bills, but otherwise the diary is relatively empty.

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