Sue Gray (political adviser)

Her report into the Partygate scandal criticised the government led by Boris Johnson and contributed to his resignation as Prime Minister in September 2022 and ultimately to leaving Parliament in June 2023.Born in north London in 1957,[3] Gray is the daughter of Irish immigrants who moved to Tottenham in the early 1950s; her father was a furniture salesman and her mother a barmaid.[9] During this time, she ran the Cove Bar, a pub in Newry, a border town in Northern Ireland, during The Troubles, with her husband Bill Conlon, a country music singer from Portaferry, County Down.[30] In 2020, Gray sought but failed to be appointed as the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, and in a subsequent interview with the BBC said: "I suspect people may have thought that I perhaps was too much of a challenger, or a disrupter.[8] Following press reports about gatherings and parties on government premises during restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2021 – a scandal which became widely known as "Partygate" – the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case initiated and led an investigation into the allegations.[34] In the report, Gray condemned "a serious failure" in the standards of leadership, and stated that a string of gatherings were "difficult to justify" while millions were unable to meet their friends and relatives.[47] By contrast former minister Francis Maude stated he had not the "slightest reason to question either her integrity or her political impartiality" and Bob Kerslake, former head of the civil service, stated he could not see a problem with the appointment given "the role is as much an organising one as a political one" and noted that Jonathan Powell and Ed Llewellyn, Tony Blair's and David Cameron's chiefs of staff respectively, were both previously employed in the civil service.[48] In June 2023, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments recommended a six-month break from the date of Gray's resignation, meaning she could work for the Labour Party from September 2023.[50][51] Following the Labour Party's victory in the 2024 general election and Keir Starmer's ascension to the office of Prime Minister, Gray became his Downing Street Chief of Staff.[57] In December 2024, it was announced that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had nominated Gray for a life peerage in the House of Lords, where she will sit as a member of the Labour Party.[67][68] In 2023, after her appointment as Starmer's chief of staff was announced, Gray was named seventh in a list drawn up by the New Statesman, of "most influential" people "shaping Britain's progressive politics" and having "some affiliation with the Left".