Ex-Partygate inquisitor Sue Gray to start work as Labour chief of staff today as Sir Keir Starmer prepares to shake up top team

• Sue Gray sparked fury when she defected to the Labour Party earlier this year 

Ex-Partygate inquisitor Sue Gray will start work for Labour today, as Sir Keir Starmer prepares to shake up his top team.

The former Whitehall mandarin sparked fury in government and the civil service when she defected to the party earlier this year.

The Cabinet Office pushed for her to be barred from taking up the role as Sir Keir’s chief of staff for at least 18 months because of the access she had to government secrets in her highly sensitive job.

But the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) recommended she serve a cooling-off period of just six months, clearing her to start this morning.

Ms Gray is expected to draw up plans for reform of the civil service to help Labour push through its programme if the party wins power next year. But her first task could be to assist with a reshuffle – a job she had substantial experience of in government.

Ex-Partygate inquisitor Sue Gray will start work for Labour today, as Sir Keir Starmer prepares to shake up his top team

Labour sources said the much-delayed shake up could come as soon as today, when MPs return to Westminster following their summer break. Sir Keir is considering shifting his troublesome deputy Angela Rayner to the Levelling Up brief, currently held by former leadership rival Lisa Nandy.

READ MORE: New Labour chief Sue Gray ‘pushing hard’ to land her favoured candidate Lady Arden role as Chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life

However, union barons are pressing for the Left-wing firebrand to keep control of Labour’s plans for the ‘future of work’, which include making it easier to strike. 

Labour chairman Anneliese Dodds is tipped to lose her role, with the more energetic Shabana Mahmood among the favourites to take the high profile job in the run-up to next year’s election.

Rising star Darren Jones is expected to get a promotion to the shadow cabinet from his current role as chairman of the Commons business committee. And Sir Keir is under pressure from some shadow ministers to sack Ed Miliband as energy spokesman.

One shadow cabinet source said it was time to ‘rid ourselves of the ghost of Ed Miliband’, who lost the 2015 election and is the architect of Labour’s radical green agenda.

Another said the Labour leader had been ‘listening to Ed too much’. Sir Keir is also considering moves to purge the party of scandal-hit MPs who could distract from the party’s efforts to regain power after more than a decade in the wilderness.

Ms Gray led the controversial inquiry into lockdown gatherings in Downing Street which helped force Boris Johnson from office last year. Mr Johnson’s former communications director Guto Harri revealed this year that the then-prime minister believed she ‘lacked perspective’ and allowed her inquiry to get ‘completely out of proportion’.

But, as the former head of the government’s propriety and ethics team she was also privy to the secrets of every Cabinet minister.

The Cabinet Office pushed for her to be barred from taking up the role as Sir Keir’s chief of staff for at least 18 months

She was first approached by Sir Keir about the job in October last year, but it was not revealed until March. An investigation by the Cabinet Office found she broke civil service rules when she held secret talks about joining Labour.

The inquiry found that she should have declared her dealings with Sir Keir when he first contacted her about becoming his chief of staff.

Cabinet Office minister Jeremy Quin told MPs her conduct was ‘deeply unfortunate’.

Ms Gray refused to cooperate with the Cabinet Office inquiry and Labour dismissed it as ‘Mickey Mouse nonsense’, saying: ‘All rules were complied with.’ She will draw up plans to overhaul Whitehall.

Ms Gray was yesterday accused of using her civil service connections to lobby for a favoured candidate to be made the new chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, who advises the PM.

Sources told The Mail on Sunday she has been ‘pushing hard’ for the job to go to Lady Mary Arden, a former Supreme Court justice. Lady Arden sat in the controversial 2019 case which saw the court rule that Mr Johnson’s suspension of Parliament prior to the final Brexit deadline was unlawful. 

Ms Gray declined to comment.

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