Starmer’s obfuscation over Gray must stop

Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, says “nothing improper at all” happened with his appointment of Sue Gray as his chief of staff. The senior civil servant, who conducted an inquiry into the so-called “partygate” breaches in No10, has resigned to take up her new post.

Why should we take Sir Keir’s word for it that all proprieties were followed? That is not a matter for him to decide any more than it was for Boris Johnson to rule on whether he had broken the lockdown rules. But it is only possible to judge if all the required information is made available and the Labour leader is reluctant to provide it.

He has now been asked on at least a dozen occasions to say when he approached Ms Gray about working for him only to decline to do so. He said they had no contact while she was holding the inquiry into Downing Street parties but that does not answer the question about first contact. Why is he being so evasive?

Sir Keir has sought to make a great deal of his lawyerly integrity and strong moral compass, contrasting them with Mr Johnson’s, and yet he is indulging in precisely the obfuscation he purports to deride.

Labour and its cheerleaders contend that outrage over the appointment is being confected by Mr Johnson in order to undermine a parliamentary inquiry into whether he knowingly misled MPS over the affair.

But questions about Ms Gray’s role are perfectly legitimate and go to the heart of civil service impartiality, which is essential to trust in our system of governance. On these pages yesterday, the eminent constitutional historian Sir Vernon Bogdanor suggested the appointment would be “unprecedented and unconstitutional”.

In the Commons, Jeremy Quin, the Cabinet Office minister, outlined the rules that apply to senior civil servants. If she was approached some time ago she should have informed senior ministers and at the very least recused herself from the “partygate” inquiry. As the former head of the Cabinet Office’s Propriety and Ethics team, she knows this better than anyone.

Civil servants seeking to leave Whitehall need to convince a panel that they will have no conflict of interest in their new employment, otherwise the appointment can be delayed for two years. If Ms Gray wants to become Mr Starmer’s chief of staff she should be made to wait until after the election.