Readers react to the Conservative party’s attempts to discredit the civil servant after it was revealed that she was going to be Keir Starmer’s chief of staff
The appointment of Sue Gray as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff (Boris Johnson allies furious as Keir Starmer hires Sue Gray as chief of staff, 2 March) can be interpreted in one of three ways: 1) Her appointment makes her retrospectively unfit to conduct an inquiry into (inter alia) Boris Johnson’s behaviour; 2) What she saw in her inquiry, as a civil servant of the highest integrity, has made her keen to work with a cleaner alternative; 3) The inquiry and her appointment are unrelated.
The first interpretation, the Moggist (Jacobean) view, is interesting. Presumably it means that any minister who subsequently takes a job in the private sector with any link of any sort to his previous ministry was unfit to do their ministerial job. Maybe it even means that Lord David Frost, who became a Tory minister, was unfit to be a civil servant. It certainly means that Dido Harding, as a Tory peer, should not have been appointed to a non-partisan job as head of NHS test and trace.
Calum Paton
Emeritus professor of public policy, Keele University
