Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff Sue Gray has taken the extraordinary step of denying she was ever a spy.
Ms Gray shot to fame when she compiled the Partygate report into events at Downing Street during lockdown.
Her damning findings were widely seen as hastening Boris Johnson’s departure from No 10.
Once so powerful in the Cabinet Office that she was described by a minister as the person who really “runs Britain”, news of Ms Gray being hired by Labour while still a civil servant was greeted with fury by the former prime minister.
Rumours that she was a spy centre on a period in her life when, during a career break in the 1980s, she briefly ran a pub in Northern Ireland – the Cove Bar in Mayobridge, Co Down, a short drive from the border with the Republic of Ireland.
Asked in a new biography of the Labour leader if she had been working for British intelligence at the time, Ms Gray laughed and said: “I’m definitely not a spy and no, I never have been.”
The book also reveals that Sir Keir had always wanted a civil servant for the post, to help him prepare for transition into government.
On Ms Gray, he said: “When all this nonsense blew up and some people were asking if I should still go ahead, I was willing to wait for her because of Sue’s obvious integrity, rather than her lack of it.”
Keir Starmer: The Biography, serialised in The Times, also reveals Sir Keir considered resigning after a crushing defeat in the Hartlepool by-election in 2021. Labour had held the seat since it was created in 1974.
Biographer Tom Baldwin was told the party leader told close aides in the immediate wake of the vote that he was going to quit, before being persuaded otherwise.
According to the book, Sir Keir’s wife Vic was among those who urged him not to act hastily.
Sue Gray: ‘I’m definitely not a spy and no, I never have been’
Another key figure who helped keep Sir Keir in his post was Morgan McSweeney, who remains Labour’s highly influential director of campaigns.
Since then, Labour has seen a dramatic turnaround in the polls, suggesting it is on course to win the keys to No 10 later this year.
