Meet Sue Gray: The woman who could decide Boris Johnson’s future

Boris Johnson and MPs are bracing for the publication of the full Sue Gray report into the partygate scandal after the Met Police completed its investigation into Downing Street breaches of Covid restrictions. Sue Gray’s initial findings into partygate were released by Boris Johnson on Monday 31 January. But who exactly is the civil servant who was tasked with the investigation?

In the 1980s, Ms Gray briefly paused her civil service career to buy a pub in Newry close to the Irish border during The Troubles. 

If Boris Johnson needed evidence that his inquisitor-in-chief is no pushover, then being landlady of a pub in Northern Ireland’s “bandit country” shows she is no soft touch.

Ms Gray had the task of investigating a series of alleged lockdown parties held in Downing Street and across government during the Covid-19 pandemic. The report has now been completed, with the initial findings that there were “failings of leadership and judgement”.

The report, which was published on gov.uk, consists of 12 pages and reveals that 12 gatherings are subject to Metropolitan Police investigation.

The Prime Minister had been questioned by Ms Gray over the partygate allegations he and other MPs face and The Telegraph understands that he shared all he knows with the civil servant.

Dominic Cummings was also interviewed by Ms Gray as part of her investigation. Mr Johnson’s former top aide, who has been critical of the Prime Minister since leaving No10, has previously claimed on his blog that he and other witnesses were prepared to swear under oath that Mr Johnson had “lied to Parliament about parties”.

However, Mr Cummings refused to meet Ms Gray in person as he feared Boris Johnson would “spin it to the media” and instead emailed his responses.

Ominously for the Prime Minister, an MP once described her as “deputy god”, while Sir Oliver Letwin admitted when in Cabinet that it had taken him “precisely two years before I realised who it is that runs Britain”, adding: “Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray. Nothing moves in Whitehall unless Sue says so.”

‘A straight shooter’

Friends call her a “straight shooter” who will leave no stone unturned in getting to the truth about the various parties – Downing Street calls them “gatherings” – but will also investigate the “culture” inside Number 10 that allowed them to occur in the first place. 

They point out the irony that had she been in the Cabinet Office at the time of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ms Gray would have put a stop to any parties once she had wind of them. 

Ms Gray does not suffer fools. For six years, she was director-general, propriety and ethics, in the Cabinet Office. 

She ran inquiries into ‘plebgate’ – in which Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, was accused of insulting a police officer – and into allegations that Damian Green had used his parliamentary computer to access pornography. Mr Green, then deputy prime minister, was forced to resign.

Now aged 63, Ms Gray has held senior civil service posts under a number of prime ministers, both Labour and Conservative, and has pulled off the trick of keeping politicians in the dark about her own political leanings. 

Public servant in a public house

Ms Gray and her husband, Bill Conlon, an acclaimed country and western singer, bought a pub, with family connections, called The Cove in the late 1980s. They ran it for a number of years before she returned to the Civil Service, working across Whitehall in transport, health and work and pensions, before joining the Cabinet Office in the late 1990s.

She served in Northern Ireland as permanent secretary in Stormont’s department of finance, but was passed over for the top job of head of the Northern Ireland civil service in 2020. 

In a rare interview, she told the BBC that she had “really wanted the job” but felt she had been passed over because “people may have thought that I perhaps was too much of a challenger, or a disruptor”.

She returned to the Cabinet Office in May 2021 to take up the post of second permanent secretary with the responsibility for the Union and Constitution.

Now she is back and her report findings have been published, Boris Johnson will face the judgment of MPs. Once the Metropolitan Police has concluded its own investigation.

This article is kept updated with the latest information.