05 Mar Sue Gray has let down Civil Service, say former Treasury secretary
SUE Gray has let down civil servants by joining the Labour Party and giving the impression that they all have a left-wing bias, according to a former private secretary at the Treasury.
Jill Rutter was commenting on the appointment of Partygate report author Ms Gray as Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.
She told GB News: “So we’ve seen people go both ways. Into the Conservatives, David Frost, most famously recently, but other people the other way and lots of people are mentioning Jonathan Powell who went to do the same job for Tony Blair.
“So why is this Sue Gray move raising perhaps the sort of concerns that those moves didn’t? First, she’s probably the only civil servant in the country anyone really has heard of because of her prominence last year over the Partygate report…
“The real worry, I think from the Civil Service point of view and quite a lot of civil servants have been expressing their concerns of the record to journalists, is not that this meant that Sue Gray was trying to stitch up Boris Johnson, I didn’t think anyone internally would think that at all.
“The real concern is a lot of ministers already have quite a prejudice against the Civil Service, they think they’re a bunch of Blair-rites and things like that and I think the real worry there is this move will reinforce the impression for those people who would believe that.”
In a discussion with Esther McVey and Philip Davies, she said: “She’s let quite a lot of civil servants down because of the impression – so civil servants all have their views.
“Everybody has their views and at the senior levels, civil servants, they’re very interested in politics, actually, civil servants are in that sort of small sense, quite political.
“One of the big challenges of the civil service is I can work for Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and they actually come with quite different views as well.“
She continued: “I don’t think Sue Gray will have brought those views to her job. I mean, in the past year, she’s worked very closely with Michael Gove at the levelling up department.
“That’s actually the job she’s doing, the propriety and ethics job she did some time ago, she’s worked with Sinn Féin’s minister of finance in Northern Ireland.
“That was a job she’s done, but quite some times she’s done a whole variety of jobs with different ministers and I think Michael Gove valued her very highly.”
Ms Rutter added: “I don’t think the civil service is really like that. I think you have people who try and do their best for the government of the day.
“There may be some people who may bring their biases to work. I think most people know that professionally you don’t do that.”
