Another day, another scandalous Sue Gray story. Although this is more of a scandlet than a full-blown scandal. The star of Partygate lasted just 94 days as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff before being shunted out of Downing Street with the rather vague newly-created title of envoy to the nations and regions. Last week it was reported that she wouldn’t be taking up this role for undisclosed reasons, only for the Sun on Sunday to reveal that this was down to yet another row over pay. According to an unnamed Westminster source, “Sue was digging her feet in over money” and demanding an increase in salary (on a pro rata basis for a part-time role) from her short-lived chief of staff role. Remember, this was a salary which saw her being remunerated better than the Prime Minister. Neither Downing Street nor Gray have commented, but the consolation prize of the new envoy role is clearly a non-starter.
The subject of Gray and pay is a touchy one in Whitehall. It’s not just that her chief of staff annual salary of £170,000 was higher than the £166,786 Starmer receives. Much of the hostility towards her that built over the summer – and culminated in her unceremonious demotion – was down to dissatisfaction among the new Labour special advisers (spads, for those in the Westminster bubble) when they found out they would be paid less than they had been while in opposition, or than their Conservative equivalents had been. Gray was partly responsible for spad salary decisions. “Special advisers’ complaints is precisely that they are paid less than their Tory predecessors,” George wrote when he reported on the subject in September, just before Gray was ousted. “Gray is paid more than any adviser in history.”
Looked at one way, this is all rather trivial, the kind of confected spat that Westminster watchers love and nobody in the world really cares about. Gray is still persona non grata for a certain subset of Tories who deem her responsible bringing down Boris Johnson (she wasn’t, but never mind), while others in the right-wing ecosystem are gleeful that Labour is giving the Conservatives a run for their money in terms of Downing Street drama.
But there is a serious issue here: one about special advisers and senior civil servants and how on Earth the great machinery of government is meant to operate if it refuses to pay anyone properly.
Because while £170,000 looks like a big number written down, it is comparatively little for a role at the very top of the UK government – and £166,786 for a Prime Minister is downright scandalous. The First Minister of Scotland gets more, for example. To compare to other public sector roles, the average vice-chancellor of a UK university is on £325,000. Research by the HR consultancy Talent Insight Group, which benchmarks the PM’s pay, found that “278 government senior officials and 57 senior BBC staff are known to be paid more than the Prime Minister”, with the CEO of HS2, CEO of Network Rail, and the Director General of the BBC “each earning over half a million pounds annually”. And that’s before you consider that the boss of Thames Water has a remuneration package of £2.3m.
Variations of these arguments were made when the story of Gray’s pay first broke – though they tended to get lost amidst endless revelations of free clothes, Arsenal perks, and Taylor Swift tickets. Besides, as George pointed out, the real rage against Gray was down to the double standard of poorly paid spads.
This subject got far less attention, but it’s worth thinking about. We’re squeamish in this country about openly discussing the role we want non-civil-service advisers to play in delivering government policy. (As for the civil service itself, political discourse tends to be somewhat schizophrenic: sometimes it’s the crown jewel of British governance, sometimes it’s something for ministers to go to war with. All the while the top civil servant – the cabinet secretary – is also paid more than the Prime Minister but has seen their pay plummet in real terms over the past two decades. But that’s another story.) Spads, appointed directly by ministers rather than coming through the civil service, are often regarded with suspicion. Their very role is an issue of contention, so inevitably their salaries are too. The Conservatives instituted a pay-freeze, meaning spad salaries (around £40,000 at the low end, less than an average train driver) have remained stagnant for 15 years.
Last week the public services think tank Reform (no relation to Nigel Farage’s party) released a report entitled “Grown Up Government” which argues this state of affairs cannot continue. “How well the government functions is directly linked to the health and prosperity of the country,” the authors write. “It is ministers who are setting the priorities for government and taking daily decisions with short- and long-term consequences. It is patently absurd that they would not be given every possible support to execute their roles.” They note that Britain is an outlier in how it treats politically appointed advisers and make a number of recommendations that include recasting spads as “valuable assets” rather than a “form of necessary evil” – as well as increasing their pay by a blanket 10 per cent, professionalising the spad structure, and enabling ministers in large departments to hire far more of their own people.
This won’t be popular at a time of cost-cutting, especially given how fast spad numbers have grown over the Tory years – from just over 60 in June 2010 to 117 in March 2023. News in September that Labour spads were unionising in protest over pay was not met with widespread sympathy. But the current set-up, in which new ministers are handed wide-ranging briefs in sprawling departments and forced to try to get a grip of the system with just one or two people to help them, clearly isn’t working either. What we currently have is the worst of all worlds, pretending spads are an optional extra when, like it or not, they are integral to the way government runs. Sue Gray was initially hired by Starmer as someone who could un-jam the broken Whitehall machine and get the levers of UK government operating properly. Wouldn’t it be satisfying if her departure proved the necessary trigger to sort out the spad system once and for all?
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
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