What Sue Gray working for Kier Starmer tells us about the state of the Civil Service

It has been announced that Sue Gray, the former Senior Civil Servant who, amongst other things, led the independent enquiry into alleged breaches of Covid rules in Number 10 will become Chief of Staff to Kier Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party.

For some, this shows that Starmer is serious about hitting the ground running if he becomes Prime Minister at the next election. Placing such an experienced civil servant as Sue Gray at the heart of his office shows that he wants to make the Government machine serve his agenda from the off. Whether you agree or not with the appointment itself, this is clearly a sound argument.

For others the appointment proves that Sue Gray’s report into ‘Partygate’ was biased, that she had an agenda against Boris Johnson when he was PM, and that the civil service as a whole has demonstrated (once again) that it is essentially left-leaning.

I won’t go into the ins-and-outs of the process for approving what Senior Civil Servants are allowed to do when they seek to leave the service (this excellent blog by the Institute for Government can help you there), but there are a few points worth making about the broader claims, that this appointment brings Sue Gray’s previous work and perhaps the service as a whole, into some jeopardy.

I think it is reasonably straightforward to dispense with most of the arguments against the legitimacy of Sue Gray’s appointment (which I will attempt to do below), but I cannot deny that it nonetheless makes me queasy. Not because I don’t think it can be defended, but because of what it says about the ongoing decline of the civil service.

Acting with impartiality

One of the key foundation principles of the civil service is that you must act impartially, and give your Minister no reason to doubt the quality or motivation for your advice. That is why there are restrictions on political activity for civil servants and why anonymity is such an closely guarded part of the job.

It is on this basis that those suggesting Sue Gray’s previous work should be questioned, and specifically that the ‘Partygate’ report and the ongoing Parliamentary enquiry into whether Boris Johnson misled Parliament, are politically driven.

First, let us quickly knock down most of this argument. Sue Gray did not instigate the ‘Partygate’ enquiry — the then Prime Minister did. Sue Gray did not set the terms of the enquiry — the then Prime Minister did. Sue Gray did not determine whether any criminal breaches of Covid lockdown restrictions occurred — the Metropolitan Police did. The Parliamentary enquiry into whether the then Prime Minister misled Parliament was not instigated by Sue Gray but by MPs through the Privileges Committee. Sue Gray was consistently described as being impartial and above reproach and indeed — when the findings of her independent report failed to show the kind of evidence that many thought might exist of the most egregious types of rule-breaking — she was lauded by many of those now criticising her.

Second, let us not pretend that this is unprecedented. There have been numerous examples of civil servants taking up political appointments. In my own previous home, the Department of Education, I saw examples of people becoming SpAds who were civil servants immediately before their appointment. We have the recent case of Lord Frost moving from being a senior diplomat to a political advisor and then a Government Minister. Logic would demand that the impartiality of the advice given by these individuals when part of the civil service should be equally questionable by those now questioning Sue Gray.

The real issue here is the fact that Sue Gray is moving to an opposition party, so that those in Government might wonder if there was an agenda to undermine them when she was a civil servant — that her potential bias might run against this administration rather than for them.

To be clear both would be dangerous. Any civil servant that shows political bias towards the Government of the day is unlikely to be able to offer the full and impartial advice needed. The necessity of the civil service to be honest and clear — to speak ‘truth to power’ — is as compromised by bias towards as against.

But more that that, the argument that subsequent actions must colour previous advice fails to understand the nature of the civil service. Being impartial does not and has never meant not having personal political views. It means ensuring those views don’t colour advice or change behaviour. I worked for Ministers from three political parties, and my advice was always based on the facts as I saw them and the job I had to do, even if that meant helping to deliver a policy I personally disagreed with. My own politics didn’t stop — they just didn’t interfere with my job. It is, in fact, common for people to separate politics and work in all walks of life. I don’t know Sue Gray, but the widest consensus seems to be clear that she is a woman of integrity. I would expect that to mean that she too did her job and didn’t let any personal politics interfere.

I would also just note that, at this stage, I don’t know if Sue Gray has been or is becoming a member of the Labour Party. Many advisors are not (Dominic Cummings has said he never joined the Tory Party, for example). This doesn’t detract from the fact that Sue Gray will clearly be working to support a Labour victory, but that mission is not necessarily driven by ideological zeal, so why should we assume such ideological zeal would have been present and effected her judgement before?

I’ve also heard some argue that the high profile nature of her role in leading the ‘Partygate’ enquiry changes how we should perceive this appointment — that there is a difference between the largely unnoticed move that people have previously made from Senior Civil Servant to SpAd and this move because Sue Gray is one of the few well-known civil servants. I would argue that this really is no different to the appointment of Lord Frost as a Government Minister — in some ways, that is an even more high profile role. And I would also argue that nothing in the work that Sue Gray did in leading the independent enquiry has actually been shown to be incorrect or politically motivated. The reason why the enquiry found that the Prime Minister broke lockdown rules is because he was proven to have broken lockdown rules. What else could anyone expect Sue Gray to have said, when there was photographic evidence and a Metropolitan Police fine? So why should she be prevented from moving into a political role, as others have done?

So why the queasiness?

The reason I feel uncomfortable with the appointment of Sue Gray is because of what it tells us about the current civil service. It is not unprecedented, true, but it does shine a light on the gradual (but I fear inexorable) slide towards the civil service become more and more politicised. And, given that her seniority in the service would have ensured a plum role in the service for some time to come — including with an incoming Labour administration — her decision also suggests that she feels she could wield more influence and power as Chief-of-Staff than as a top Mandarin. That says something profound about the way the relationship between Ministers and the service has changed.

Civil Servants and political advisors have long had to work alongside one another. The 1980s parody in Yes, Minister generally has the service well on top, but even Sir Humphrey couldn’t ignore SpAds. There were just far fewer of them compared to the much larger civil service.

That changed under Blair, as this chart shows, and that growth in the number of SpAds was matched by an increase in the number of stories about them and a wider sense that they formed an unelected but dangerous new part of the system. The career of Alistair Campbell is probably the best example and, in part because of his example, the rise in the number of SpAds became a political issue in itself.

2010 was meant to see a change with all major parties vowing to save money and cut the number of SpAds. Except we had the unexpected Coalition Government, which meant that both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives needed their own SpAds. So numbers climbed rather than fell, as did the number of ‘non-SpAd’ SpAds — people brought in as civil servant advisors but generally for their specific knowledge and support of Government policy rather than as impartial advisors, to try to keep the numbers of formal SpAds down.

As it so often does, the civil service adapted to circumstances. This did, however, exacerbate an ongoing blurring of the line between civil servants and SpAds, with this stronger and ambiguous ‘non-SpAd’ SpAd group often wielding significant influence, for example by speaking to journalists and briefing political lines.

This politicisation would appear to be at odds with the idea that the civil service is anti-Government (at least this Government) in some way, that it is full of pinko-liberals determined to undermine the Tories. After all, if there has been increased politicisation, 13 years of Conservative rule would suggest that it has likely politicised to the right. So what do I think is happening?

First, the vast majority of civil servants are still in more junior roles with limited exposure to the more political upper echelons. Nonetheless, many of these civil servants will have a belief in the power of the state — they are after all working directly for it — and that can be seen in some circumstances as a left-wing bias. But I think that is a pretty soft, left-of-centre view and one that would have encompassed the main position of all political parties since the Second World War. Even those arguing for a smaller state have not sought to completely resile from Government action. It is essentially the equivalent of an employee in an organisation being asked to agree with its mission — you don’t join a bank if you are an anarcho-Marxist, and you don’t seek a job working for the state if you don’t believe in the state.

Second, the civil service has, with good reason, often been seen as a ‘small-c conservative’ institution. Again, nobody would accuse Sir Humphrey of being anything other that very firmly establishment. From the ongoing prominence of Oxbridge and privately educated people in the upper rungs of the civil service, to the annual collections of gongs, the civil service has long been at the heart of the British constitutional settlement. Incoming Labour Governments over the years have worried intensely about a conservative bias at the top of the service.

What feels different in recent times, perhaps since Brexit but certainly since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, is that the Government has been more anti-establishment than before, and demanded proof of loyalty more than before.

Brexit was an ideologically driven policy, with a clear democratic mandate from the British public. That is fine and proper in a democracy, and the civil service had a duty to carry it out. However, two things made that complicated and further stressed the lines between politics and the service. The first is that Ministers did not just want Brexit to be carried out, they wanted it to be a demonstrable success by the terms of the Leave campaign, but many of the promises made by that campaign did not stack-up against the reality of the situation. The second is that, because the Leave campaign did not propose a specific model for Brexit, there was never a clear way to deliver the mandate (as internal Tory Party politics felt all too keenly). Civil Servants working on Brexit policy too often found themselves in the intolerable situation of having to offer unwelcome advice (and being ignored, and even bullied) or compromising on the quality of advice (i.e. telling Ministers what they wanted to hear) in order to continue to do their jobs. In other words, as soon as Ministers demanded loyalty and a sense of ideological commitment to Brexit, they undermined one of the core components of the civil service.

Alongside this world of ungrounded policy development, we have also seen a rise in populism, culminating (thus far at least!) in the elevation of Boris Johnson to the premiership. Theresa May, it could be argued, started to process of eroding British Constitutional norms by refusing to resign after losing various Brexit votes — clearly a matter of confidence in any other time — but the Johnson administration oversaw unprecedented attacks on constitutional arrangements. Framed differently, the Johnson administration was not ‘small c conservative’ and so any natural in-built sympathy held by the civil service was lost.

That partly explains why we have seen the elevation of certain people to the most senior civil servant roles, people who would not normally have been considered. The strongest example is Simon Case who became the least experienced Cabinet Secretary since the role was created. These appointments are driven by a desire to have malleable civil servants at the top, not looking to provide the sort of robust challenge that the civil service has always offered behind closed doors. The recent leaking of WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock includes a number where Simon Case demonstrates behaviours that would horrify previous incumbents. Sir Jeremy Heywood would not have acted so.

Why is all of this relevant to Sue Gray’s appointment? I fear it shows a downward cycle in which progress in the civil service is increasingly linked to responding to a Government agenda unmoored from the British Constitutional settlement that has existed for more than 150 years. That greater politicisation within the service does little to assuage Ministers’ fears that the civil service is working against them because the nature of being a civil servant — of providing clear and honest advice — can be seen as proof of disloyalty. That talent is leaching out because there are few things more demoralising that feeling powerless to have a positive impact.

Sue Gray has looked at the service — one she has worked in for so long — and decided that there is a more fruitful world for her in a political appointment than there is by staying in the service. She would rather be Chief-of-Staff to Starmer than become Cabinet Secretary in the future. Such a choice would simply have never occurred to Sir Humphrey.