Was the big story the first anniversary of the barbaric terrorist massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians with all its ongoing global consequences? Or was it the ‘resignation’ (aka sacking) of Sir Keir Starmer’s controversial chief of staff, Sue Gray, with its domestic political fallout? Rightly or wrongly, more papers chose the latter over the former, including the FT, Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Express, the i and City AM. Only the Guardian and online Independent made the Israel anniversary the front-page lead.
Take the Daily Mail, for example, with its splash headline, ‘SUE GRAY FARCE SHOWS PM’S LACK OF JUDGEMENT, BLASTS KEMI’. Inside, Ms Badenoch — whose own judgement is regularly open to question — was accorded the opportunity to try and reinvigorate her Tory leadership campaign with a guest column headlined, ‘Hiring Sue Gray may prove to be Starmer’s worst decision. It shows Labour do not have principles’.
The paper’s saturation coverage continued with a double page spread headlined, ‘The 10 Downing Street ‘boys’ club’ sees off Sue’ — a dig at the alleged group of predominantly young male SPADS close to Gray’s replacement, Sir Keir’s election winning strategist, Morgan McSweeney, whose clashes with Gray had become the stuff of headline grabbing leaks and secret briefings. The spread completed with political columnist and GB News presenter Andrew Pierce declaring that a toxic power struggle between the pair ignited a ‘final flash point that left PM’s chief in a scramble to negotiate ‘dignified’ way out’. In addition, the Mail’s main leader, ‘Key aide’s ousting is proof of No10 chaos’ began with, ‘It is a truism that all governments ultimately end in chaos. Yet Sir Keir Starmer’s administration has pulled off the near impossible feat of starting in disarray... Nothing illustrates this more than the ousting of Sue Gray, his hand-picked chief of staff, after a series of controversies. The combative aide was embroiled in vicious infighting with colleagues, a row over her bumper salary and a scandal over cronyism and freebies. She may be gone, but that damage can’t be undone.’
All about Johnson
But the paragraph that betrays the reasoning behind the Mail’s saturation coverage is: ‘Whichever way you cut it, this saga shows poor judgement by Sir Keir. His appointment of Ms Gray, a supposedly impartial senior civil servant whose Partygate probe ended Boris Johnson’s parliamentary career, never passed the sniff test’.
The Gray Day Massacre was perfectly timed for the Mail and its expensive serialisation of Johnson’s memoir ‘Unleashed’, a tome the paper hyped to high heaven as, ‘The Political Memoir of the Century’, while most reviewers mocked and debunked it. Or, as one former Johnson era minister put it to me, ‘It’s a rollicking, typically Bojo offering but Waterstones must have agonised over whether to put it in the fiction or non-fiction sections.’
Certainly, it ‘unleashed’ Johnson himself to ramp up his depiction of Sue Gray (the woman he personally trusted to conduct the Partygate probe) as some kind of treacherous Labour secret agent hellbent on destroying him as he did the book publicity interview rounds on air and in print. For the Mail, it was also the opportunity to revive its obsessive conviction that Johnson was unjustly ousted as PM and that the Conservatives’ fortunes would have been electorally very different if he had survived such ‘trivial’ matters as Partygate and misleading parliament. Or, come to think of it, his own chequered history with freebies, cronyism and vicious in-fighting at No10.
That said, Sue Gray’s downfall and Sir Keir and Labour’s record speed poll collapse so soon after a landslide election victory already has Johnson and his inner circle, along with the Mail and in all probability, the Telegraph and Express, contemplating the idea of a future Churchillian comeback even as the Conservative party goes through the laborious process of choosing Rishi Sunak’s successor.
For its part, The Times — which led Page1 on October 7th with ‘Gray ousted in Labour ‘coup’’ came up with the best leader column headlined ‘Gray’s Elegy... a new chief of staff must bring order to the ragged team of advisers at No10’.
Less hysterically partisan than the Mail, it went on: ‘Sue Gray’s devastating report into the Downing Street parties and gatherings during lockdown was the catalyst that forced the resignation of Boris Johnson. Her rapid hiring by Sir Keir Starmer to direct and sharpen Labour’s policies in opposition infuriated the Conservatives who sensed a plot and suggested she had been partisan in her investigation. They need not have worried. Her tenure as chief of staff at Downing Street has been turbulent, fractious and divisive. It has contributed significantly to the inept handling of the row over gifts given to cabinet ministers. Her resignation comes not a moment too soon. She had, as she correctly assessed, become a ‘distraction’ to the government’s work of change’.
The Times leader (and, remember, the Murdoch title supported Labour at the election) struck a chord with those within the Labour team, and pro-Labour commentators like me, who feared taking Sue Gray, for all her civil service pedigree, into government was a high risk Starmer gamble. And that was before the Freebiegate / Wardrobegate own goals exploded in the prime minister’s face. Sources suggest Ms Gray deluded herself she was a ‘savvy’ media expert with disastrous effect.
Righting the ship?
The October 8th edition of the Times led the front page again with the headline, ‘No 10 crisis bigger than Gray... Whitehall chiefs warn of dysfunctional Downing St’. Another neat main leader headline, ‘Morgan Free Man’, went on, ‘The ruthless defenestration of Sue Gray will hopefully end infighting in No10. It now falls to Morgan McSweeney to vindicate his selection as the new chief of staff’. While also opining: ‘Mr McSweeney is a formidable campaigner but the jury is out on his ability to fill the role of prime ministerial right-hand man.’
Inevitably, the main focus of the Starmer revamp of his team has been on McSweeney. The same issue of The Times carried a two-page profile by ITV News’ well-connected deputy editor Anushka Asthana (also author of ‘Taken as Red: How Labour Won Big and The Tories Crashed the Party’). The article’s headline, ‘Keir, karaoke and the man in the poncho’, illustrated why Morgan McSweeney is the kind of colourful character guaranteed to attract more than his fair share of media attention. Not least from Tory titles like the Mail, unrepentantly convinced they were right and the electorate wrong on July 4th and that the next election isn’t a lost cause for the Conservatives, with or without any alliance with Nigel Farage and Reform. Certainly, the Gray fallout has gifted the contenders in the relatively lacklustre Tory leadership contest a weapon to bang on about to whoever is bothered to listen.
But while the media focus is on Morgan McSweeney, an equally crucial — arguably even more crucial — appointment in the Starmer shakeup comes with that of the former Mirror and Sunday Times political journalist and NHS communications chief James Lyons as communications overlord. Intriguingly and controversially, his most recent role has been as head of pan-European policy comms at Chinese owned platform giant TikTok which just happens to be banned on security grounds on UK government phones. Tory China hawks inside and outside Westminster will doubtless raise red flags for all they’re worth.
As I wrote in a recent column here (Does Sir Keir need a real life Malcolm Tucker?) Communications failures have bedevilled No10 from the start, epitomised by the mishandling of the Freebiegate furore and the absence of a communications supremo with the authority and the well-tuned antennae of Alastair Campbell in the early Blair years. All too often during the recent media firestorm, the prime minister has resembled an exposed, badly briefed rabbit caught in the brutal glare of hostile headlines and camera lights.
By all accounts, Lyons has some of the qualities required to steady the listing communications ship. But with The Times on October 9th headlining a new YouGov poll showing just 27% of the public now have a favourable opinion of Starner and Labour down to just a 1% lead over the Tories, the paper’s headline, ‘Keir Starmer as unpopular as Nigel Farage, poll shows’ offers cold comfort.
So, clearly, James Lyons stepping into the No10 den could prove as much a key role for the prime minister and his government’s future as that of Morgan McSweeney, Rachel Reeves and any one of his top cabinet ministers.
With total predictability Rishi Sunak tried a few plodding Sue Gray jokes at the October 9th return of PMQs that failed to ruffle a single Starmer feather. The outgoing leader of the opposition might have done better to have simply waved the much cleverer Gray-themed cover of the latest Private Eye.
