Has Sue Gray made Labour ready for government?

Shadow ministers were caught out by the early election, but Keir Starmer’s chief of staff will manage an orderly transfer of power, writes John Rentoul

Will Gray make No 10 as effective as it was in Blair’s later years? (PA)

Shadow ministers admit that they were “caught out completely by the election timing”, according to one of my sources. However, Morgan McSweeney, the party’s campaign manager, guessed that the announcement was coming because of the spike in betting on a July date.

What an irony that the greed and folly of Conservatives in the prime minister’s inner circle should not only have damaged their party’s campaign by prompting the Gambling Commission and the police to investigate possible law-breaking, but also alerted the opposition.

McSweeney managed to buy up in advance a lot of advertising space on Conservative news websites for this weekend and the next few days, and was surprised to have got there before the Tories did. Thus Mail Online is currently emblazoned with “Change” and Labour’s Union Jack design.

This tells us two things. One is that Labour has lots of money, because donors think it is likely to win, which means it can take advantage of the higher election spending limits legislated for by the Tories – which were condemned at the time as a disgraceful attempt to skew the rules in the Tories’ favour. The other is that Rishi Sunak took his own party by surprise more than he wrong-footed the opposition.

However, although McSweeney showed that the campaigning side of the Labour operation is agile and ruthless, the political side was less so. Shadow cabinet members are still “scrambling like hell to get ready”, I am told. Their pre-election “access talks” with civil servants, coordinated by Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, had been on a timetable that assumed an election in November.

Again, though, Labour has been lucky. Because the election is not a close contest, shadow ministers are under less pressure to be on the campaign trail, and have been able to devote a surprising amount of time preparing for government. I understand that several senior members of the shadow cabinet have been reassured by civil servants that they will be well prepared by Thursday.

Mind you, this view is disputed by other sources who say that all sorts of important decisions that could be taken now have been allowed to pile up. It is said that Starmer is slow to make decisions, although I think it is too early to say whether this is the caution of a good politician not wanting to close off options until they have to, or whether it is simply indecision in the manner of Gordon Brown, whose arrival as prime minister induced an immediate logjam in No 10.

Labour’s first King’s Speech on 17 July, setting out the legislative programme for the new government, for example, is more or less decided. But important questions such as when the VAT rise on school fees will be imposed – probably not until September next year – remain open.

The new prime minister has a number of international engagements, and is supposed to be hosting the fourth summit meeting of the European Political Community at Blenheim Palace on 18 July. This is the grouping set up by Emmanuel Macron two years ago as the outer layer of the European onion, and will be an important moment for a new Labour government to rejig relations with the EU.

It could be that Starmer knows exactly what he wants to use this platform for, but hasn’t told anyone for fear of damaging leaks during the election campaign about “reversing Brexit”. Or it could be that he hasn’t decided, and that policy will be formed under the pressure of events in the first two weeks of a new government.

My assumption is that Starmer knows what he is doing, mainly because Gray knows what she is doing. She is likely to make the chief of staff role work well. She shares some of the qualities of Jonathan Powell, who created the current role under Tony Blair. He understood the civil service, although he had been in the foreign office, which regards itself as different from the home civil service; he understood power and he had the prime minister’s confidence.

Gray not only has those advantages, but she worked in the Cabinet Office in Blair’s third term. She understands the politics of delivery, Blair’s obsession at the time, and she understands the politics of politics, having managed the No 10 end of dealings with the Metropolitan Police over the loans for peerages business.

So when we ask “Is Labour ready?”, the answer is that Gray will have ensured that new ministers will know what they are supposed to be doing. Technically, the transition is likely to go smoothly. We saw an example of what that looks like at King’s College London on Thursday, when Ed Balls chaired a session looking back at the moment he and Gordon Brown arrived at the Treasury after the 1997 election with the plan to make the Bank of England independent in an envelope in his jacket.

Some shadow ministers will be that well prepared for office this Friday. But is Labour ready in the larger sense, of being prepared for the huge political challenge of taking over when the country faces serious problems and the public finances are wrecked?

I suspect that they may be better prepared than they seem to be. Rachel Reeves, the Gordon Brown of today, may appear to have closed off all her options for higher taxes or higher borrowing that everyone assumes will be needed. But it may be that she has a shrewd understanding of how politics will open up after the election and how she will have more room for manoeuvre than she seems to now.

And it may be that Gray, the Jonathan Powell of today, will make No 10 as effective as it was in Blair’s later years. With the added advantage, of course, that Gray and Reeves will be speaking to each other, unlike Powell and Brown, who never exchanged a word.