Starmer wields the knife after shaky 100 days in office

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After almost 100 days in office, Sir Keir Starmer on Sunday finally decided to get a grip on his stumbling administration. “Keir will always wield the knife when it needs to be done,” said one Labour MP. “Now he has.”

The departure of Sue Gray from her key role as Starmer’s chief of staff was the catalyst for Sunday’s complete overhaul of the Number 10 operation. Many were left wondering why it had taken the prime minister so long.

Starmer, who hired Gray in 2023 to help him prepare for government, had been loyal to his chief of staff in office, in spite of fierce internal criticism of her management style.

But those close to the prime minister say that a morose and fractious Labour conference in Liverpool last month convinced him he had to draw a line under the mis-steps that had dogged his first months in office.

“Keir came back from the conference pretty chastened,” said one Labour insider. “He realised he needed to get a grip on things.”

In Liverpool party members expressed their concern at how Starmer had cut winter fuel payments for 10mn pensioners, then appeared unable to contain a row over his receipt of £32,000 in “freebie” suits and glasses.

Gray had become a lightning rod for discontent, with hostile internal briefings about her £170,000 salary and alleged “control freakery”. Labour special advisers, or Spads, claimed she was partly responsible for holding down their salaries.

Gray’s allies said all of this was grotesquely unfair on a hard-working and loyal member of the Starmer team, a view shared by many cabinet members.

But one senior minister told the Financial Times: “It was only a question of when, not if. Not everything was her fault, but the transition to government, the situation with the Spads and the unending freebies clusterfuck were all on her and made her position untenable.”

A person close to the discussions over the Downing Street shake-up said that after returning from Liverpool — via the UN General Assembly in New York — Starmer began lamenting the fact that Gray had “become the story”. 

Gray acknowledged she had become a “distraction”. She will now take up a role as an adviser to Starmer on relations with the UK’s devolved nations and regions, but her grip on the levers of power in Number 10 is over.

The former civil servant was also blamed for being a bottleneck in appointing people to key jobs, a problem that was rectified by the prime minister on Sunday as he announced a dramatic overhaul of his team. 

Morgan McSweeney, who was on the long march in opposition with Starmer, replaces Gray as chief of staff. It was McSweeney who helped to slay the threat of the Corbynite left and then masterminded Labour’s landslide election victory in 2024.

But some question whether he is cut out to be a chief of staff, especially given his lack of Whitehall experience. “Morgan is very popular with Labour staffers — this is like a players’ revolt in a football dressing room,” said one Labour veteran. “But he’s not the sort of person who puts things down on paper.”

There was a long-standing narrative at Westminster that McSweeney was part of a “boys club” around Starmer that was treated with suspicion by Gray. 

Starmer appointed two women to work as deputy chiefs of staff alongside McSweeney — Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson — a move seen by some Labour MPs as a riposte to any suggestion that the boys club had won.

Gray did not have any deputy chiefs of staff, an omission seen in Labour circles as contributing to a lack of grip at the centre and a sign of her unwillingness to share responsibility with others. “That was her choice,” said one ally of Starmer.

While Alakeson and Cuthbertson are highly regarded in Number 10 — the former is Starmer’s political director and the latter is a long-term Starmer lieutenant — Gray’s departure leaves the centre decidedly short of Whitehall experience.

In despatching Gray to the UK’s regions and nations, he has brought into his inner circle people who were already part of his trusted gang. “It’s a circling of the wagons,” said one person close to Starmer.

The exception is James Lyons, a former Sunday Times political journalist, NHS communications chief and TikTok media executive hired by Starmer to beef up his media team, which will continue to be headed by director of communications Matthew Doyle.

Lyons will have a strategic comms role, including oversight of Downing Street’s “grid” of future announcements. It is a common complaint of Labour staffers that the grid, previously under Gray’s control, has been chaotic.

Pat McFadden, cabinet office minister and part of Starmer’s inner circle, is said by party insiders to have played a key role in the shake-up, being close to both McSweeney and Lyons. 

The result of Sunday’s upheaval is that Starmer ends his first 100 days in office with what looks more like a functioning Number 10 operation. Many Labour MPs, privately, believe it is not before time.