Sue Gray to take seat in Lords months after leaving heart of Government
The former senior civil servant was among 30 new Labour peers who were announced last December by Downing Street.
Sue Gray, the “partygate” investigator who went on to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, will take her seat in the Lords on Tuesday four months after leaving the heart of Government.
The former senior civil servant was among 30 new Labour peers who were announced last December by Downing Street as it seeks to rebalance Parliament’s unelected second chamber.
Six appointments from the Tories, including Liz Truss’s former deputy prime minister Dame Therese Coffey, and two from the Liberal Democrats were also confirmed.
Ms Gray will be introduced to the House as Baroness Gray of Tottenham alongside Baroness Cash, a Conservative nomination.
Ms Gray went from an influential but little-known arbiter of conduct in Government to a household name when she took on the probe into Covid rule-breaking at Boris Johnson’s Number 10 in 2021.
She stepped in to lead the investigation after then-cabinet secretary Simon Case, her boss, recused himself following allegations that his own office held a Christmas event amid a lockdown.
Civil service impartiality was later thrown into question amid Tory criticism of her move to quit the Cabinet Office after decades in Whitehall and join Labour as Sir Keir’s chief of staff.
Scrutiny of her new role mounted after the party won the election, with leaked disclosures that the 67-year-old earned more than the Prime Minister and reports of a power struggle in Downing Street between her and other aides.
After weeks of negative briefings against her, Ms Gray announced her resignation in October in a statement citing concerns that she was “becoming a distraction” to the work of Government.
Ms Gray was set to take up a newly created role as “envoy to the nations and regions” after a break from Government but Number 10 announced a month after her departure that she had decided not to take up the job.
In December, she was among 30 Labour figures and Starmer loyalists to be appointed to the Lords.
A Labour source said at the time that the Conservatives had created an “imbalance” in the Lords that needed to be “corrected”.
Some 17 of the new Labour peers are women after the party pledged reform of the upper chamber including by redressing its gender imbalance.
The nominations boost Sir Keir’s numbers in the Lords, which sat at 187 Labour peers compared to 273 from the Conservatives.
