Sue Gray: The civil servant who holds Boris Johnson’s future in her hands

Sue Gray, the senior civil servant who has been tasked with investigating “Partygate”, has the future of Boris Johnson in her hands. The expectation is that she will declare that, although Johnson did nothing “criminal” – and what a low bar for probity our prime minister has been set! – he has poor judgement. Well, knock us down with a feather, etc.

Waiting has become the Tory watchword, the party being encouraged to say little until the publication of her “findings” – which may not be the full report. But, with ever more Partygate stories dancing onto the front pages by the day, it might turn out to be harsher than has been hinted at.

There is some suggestion (from Dominic Cummings) that Gray and the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, have briefed the PM on their findings thus far. In any case, Gray won’t be producing a “verdict” on whether Johnson should quit, which is beyond her remit. Nonetheless, the spin does have a plausible feel about it, and the chances are the report will be a nuanced, cautious affair, the product of the mind of a consummate civil servant.

It will be a remarkable achievement, because Gray is in an invidious position. She took over the increasingly onerous, not to say distasteful, task of cataloguing Whitehall’s party culture from the cabinet secretary, after Case recused himself when it emerged that he had attended what is euphemistically called a “gathering”. The role of cabinet secretary, at the very apex of the civil service, carries a certain amount of weight, even though Case is a relatively young incumbent, hand-picked by Johnson.

The position held by Gray, despite her formidable reputation as a fierce and supremely capable operator, does not – at least formally. She is not Case’s deputy, but the second permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office. It is a big job, and her authority is enhanced by the respect she commands personally. However, her role cannot carry the same weight as that of the head of the civil service.

Gray’s other problem is that if she is regarded as being too weak, she’ll be accused of a whitewash. Yet if she errs the other way, she’ll be despised by Johnson loyalists – which may not be good for her promotion prospects. Worse still, the reputation of the civil service could be tarnished, and she cares about that. It all points to caution.

With the best will in the world, it will be difficult for Gray to have to list the shortcomings of a large number of her colleagues – of special advisers, of ministers and ex-ministers, of Case himself, of Martin Reynolds – the prime minister’s principal private secretary – and of the prime minister himself. Gray used to be the government’s in-house watchdog, and she’s not the type to be intimidated.

Previous subjects of high-profile investigations by Gray include Liam Fox, as David Cameron’s defence secretary; Andrew Mitchell and “plebgate”; and Damian Green, Theresa May’s de facto deputy prime minister, who ended up getting the sack after having been “misleading” in a statement about a police investigation into pornography found on his office computer. He also faced allegations of inappropriate behaviour made by a journalist, Kate Maltby.

Some, at least, of those who have encountered Gray have had nothing but praise for her. Mitchell, who left the cabinet, now tells Michael Crick: “I have always found her to be extremely straightforward, very easy to deal with; she’s got a great sense of humour and she is clear-cut and doesn’t shilly-shally around.” Maltby adds another coating of gloss: “I have seen Sue Gray at work, close up ... She remains one of very few people I’ve ever seen in Westminster stand up purely for what was morally right, her chief priority being to protect the most junior whistleblowers from the powerful political bosses.”

Gray must hope that her reputation, status and attitude will get the best out of Johnson, so to speak. She will presumably have to interview the prime minister, place his behaviour in context, measure his actions against the strictures of various Covid laws, guidance and conventions, and then, possibly, refer the matter to the person responsible for enforcing the ministerial code – one Boris Johnson. The terms of her remit thus start to look absurd and unworkable in the current circumstances.

When the investigation was set up, it was assumed that Johnson hadn’t been at any of the parties, or known of them, and was “sickened” at the very thought. Now we know he was involved to some degree, and Gray will have to record his absurd contention that he thought he was attending a work meeting when he happened to wander into the garden.

Gray’s now outdated terms of reference state: “Any matters relating to the conduct of ministers should follow the process set out in the ministerial code in the normal way.” But matters are far from normal. Theoretically, Johnson could refer himself, under the ministerial code, to Lord Geidt, but that seems unlikely. Johnson, not Gray or Geidt, will be judge and jury in a matter that concerns his own actions. It’s all topsy turvy.

The important point here, picked up by Labour’s ever-alert Wes Streeting, is that Gray may well be impartial and expert, but she is not independent, and her work will therefore lack authority. After all, she ultimately reports to Johnson in her day job, through Michael Gove – and will present her report on the partying ways of Johnson and others direct to the PM. As Streeting tweeted: “Kirsty Wark described Sue Gray as ‘independent’ on BBC Newsnight. This is incorrect. She is a civil servant who reports to her superiors. She is in an impossible position, with an impossible task, but it is inaccurate to describe her as independent.”

Impossible, then, but unavoidable, and there’s probably no better person in the British civil service to take it on. She is the perfect civil servant. Gray likes to be “helpful” to her ministers, and give them advice they want to hear. But she is also careful to stick to the rules, taking power of discretion when allowed (often because she wrote the relevant rules with that in mind), but not stepping over any clearly defined lines. If she needs to tell a minister they absolutely can’t do something, she will – but she will also offer an alternative route if possible. She solves problems.

Gray possesses a “political” mind – she understands politicians (without wishing to be one herself). This makes her ideally suited to this investigation, and to be at the centre of policymaking in the Cabinet Office – and, from 2012 to 2018, to have been director general, propriety and ethics – the government’s “sleazebuster”. Every peerage, honour, important civil service appointment, memoir, complaint, ministerial reshuffle and ethical disaster would attract her attention, and she was kept pretty busy.

One keen observer of her work, Chris Cook – former policy editor at the BBC and now at the Financial Times – has described the key to her popularity with prime ministers very well: “If the government feels it has to get rid of a minister, she will give them cover to do that. If a government really wants to keep someone, she’ll find a way to do that.”

Highly intelligent, she knows how to get things done. She knows how to get the civil service machine to work – another rare gift: advisers advise, ministers decide, Sue gets it done. She tends to get on well with the brainier politicians, including Oliver Letwin, Francis Maude, David Laws, and latterly Gove, with whom she’s worked a good deal in the Cabinet Office and lately in his ambitious but amorphous “levelling up” job. Gray also displays the guile of a really successful operator, seemingly preferring to leave no documentary trail for sensitive discussions or decisions. Things are preferably thrashed out in conversation, face to face, or on the phone.

Freedom of Information, it’s fair to say, is not one of her favourite things. She reputedly deletes her emails every day, and pioneered the “double delete” technique of erasing electronic messaging at both ends: something that is normal in her circles. She even advised Gove (incorrectly) that it was OK for him to use his (then) wife’s email for work, under the name “Mrs Blurt”.

She is dedicated to the public service, then, but not always to the public. She is one of those people whose work is their life. It defines her. Very unusually for someone near the top of the tree, she didn’t go to university, still less the archetypal Oxbridge college. Little in fact is known about her origins, her personal or even her professional life – she is a civil servant who on the whole likes to stay in the shadows, and she has succeeded in avoiding attention (and scrutiny) to an unusual degree. Her birth date, for example, is reportedly 1957 or 1958.

With Sue Gray, it’s all about merit. As far as can be judged – even her official biography is scant – she started straight from school in the late 1970s, on the lowest rungs of the ladder at the Department of Transport, and worked her way up through various policy and implementation roles, at Health and at Work and Pensions, until the 1980s. Then something unexpected happened: she packed it in and went off to run a pub in Newry, Northern Ireland, for about ten years, after which she came back to the Cabinet Office.

Landlady Sue ran the pub with her husband, Bill Conlon, a country singer with an Irish accent, who was born in County Down and is around the same age as Gray. The pub, The Cove, was in a region so violent that it was dubbed “Bandit Country” at the time. The pub is now a nursery, but in its day it was successful enough.

In a rare interview for BBC Northern Ireland, Gray was sentimental about her career move/break: “I loved it, loved it at the time; I’d never do it again. I think actually it’s a very sociable occupation, very hard work. But I loved meeting people. I think it was in a relatively country area, so a mix of farmers, business people, a great mix of characters, and I got to know them really well and I threw myself into that.”

At any rate, she has served the Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and now Johnson administrations, mostly with distinction. Gordon Brown notes in his memoirs (very possibly vetted by her) that she supplied “wise advice when – as all too regularly happened – mini-crises and crises befell”.

By the time of the Con-Lib coalition in 2010, she was a force at the top of government. George Osborne tweeted about his reaction to Partygate: “Earlier I told a friend: they’ll have to get Sue Gray. On our night in Downing Street in 2010 – 30 minutes after the Labour team had left – everyone was fawning at David Cameron. Then someone spoke out: ‘I’m sorry PM, but you can’t do that’. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. Sue Gray”.

Oliver Letwin agrees: “It took me precisely two years before I realised who it is that runs Britain. Our great United Kingdom is actually entirely run by a lady called Sue Gray, the head of ethics or something in the Cabinet Office – unless she agrees, things just don’t happen.”

She is not, of course, flawless, and she’s had her setbacks. In 2018 she went back to Northern Ireland, this time in the more conventional role of permanent secretary at the Department of Finance, to clear things up after the heat and power scandal. She came back to the Cabinet Office only last summer after she had failed to get the top job in the Northern Ireland civil service. She told the BBC afterwards: “I really wanted the job, but had to get over it ... Why didn’t I get the job? I’m not sure I’ll ever quite know, but I suspect, you know... I suspect people may have thought that I perhaps was too much of a challenger, or a disrupter.”

She added: “I am both. Perhaps I would bring about ... too much change. And yes, I wanted to have change.”

Such candour is sadly highly unusual; Gray’s normal public reticence, to put it mildly, about her work has seen her described as “the most important person you’ve never heard of”. In one parliamentary hearing, Paul Flynn – the late Labour MP – said Gray was “Deputy God”. Until now. Her recent fame must have come as an unpleasant surprise. She seldom appears before select committees, and one outing over Greensill last year – she agreed to go – was blocked by Gove.

Under something called the Osmotherly Rules (a typical bit of the kind of constitutional arcanery Gray thrives on), she is, arguably, accountable to parliament via her minister, Gove, but that doesn’t work if he doesn’t know the details of decisions she has taken.

You can’t help but conclude that we really do need to see and hear more from this public servant, but there is little chance of that. When her findings are published, questions about them will be answered by Johnson, with his spin on things, which is a bit mad if you think about it.

There is so much more, too, about Gray’s activities over the decades that might be usefully revealed in the name of transparency and the public interest. Former cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell agrees: “If there is any one person in the civil service who could write their memoirs, hers would be the most valuable, the most priceless and the most sensational. I am extremely confident that such a memoir will never be written – her secrets will go to the grave.”