The prime minister has said he made the wrong choice in appointing former senior civil servant Sue Gray as his chief of staff last year.
In an interview with biographer Tom Baldwin, published in the Observer today, Starmer said: “Not everyone thought it was a good idea when I appointed her. It was my call, my judgment, my decision, and I got that wrong. Sue wasn’t the right person for this job.”
Gray, a household name due to her investigation of the Partygate scandal, left her role as Cabinet Office second permanent secretary in March 2023 to become Starmer’s chief of staff. She announced her departure from the position in October 2024 to “avoid becoming a distraction” amid intense briefings about her.
Comments today from Pat McFadden, the duchy of Lancaster, suggest it was Starmer’s choice to let her go, however. He told the BBC it was a “great shame” that the appointment of Gray “didn't work out”, and that “the prime minister decided it wasn't working out and made the change”.
Gray was expected to take up a role as the prime minister's envoy for nations and regions after leaving Starmer’s team but eventually decided not to accept the position. In December, she was awarded a life peerage by the King.
In a separate interview with the BBC today, former cabinet secretary Simon Case said the appointment of Gray was a "very unusual" decision and that her joining the Labour leader’s team after decades as a civil servant "was a source of enormous controversy within the civil service".
Case also said the arrival of Gray less than a year before the general election meant Starmer’s team "wasn't sort of fully bedded in and tested" before going into government.
The former head of the civil service added that the choice to replace Gray with McSweeney was “a very good appointment" because "I could see right from the first day of having conversations with him how sharp a political operator he was".
In the civil service, Gray's former roles include permanent secretary of Northern Ireland's Department of Finance, and director general of propriety and ethics in the Cabinet Office from 2012-2018.
Earlier in her career, Gray worked in the transport and health departments and in the Department for Work and Pensions. She took a career break in the late 1980s when she bought and ran a pub in Newry, Northern Ireland.
Starmer reveals regrets in first year as PM
Starmer,who has been talking to Baldwin for a biography on the PM which will published next month, also revealed several regrets from his first year as prime minister.
He said his remarks during a speech on immigration reforms that the country risked “becoming an island of strangers” – comments which drew comparisons with former Conservative minister Enoch Powell – were a mistake.
“I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell,” he said. “I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either. But that particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it."
The prime minister also said there were “problems with the language” in his foreword to the Restoring control over the immigration system white paper which set out the planned reforms.
In the foreword, Starmer said "inward migration exploded to over a million people a year – four times the level compared with 2019", that Britain "became a one-nation experiment in open borders", and that "the damage this has done to our country is incalculable".
Starmer told Baldwin the issue needed addressing because the party “became too distant from working-class people on things like immigration”, but added that “this wasn’t the way to do it in this current environment”.
He also expressed regret about his speech in the No.10 rose garden last summer, where he warned “things will get worse before they get better”.
Starmer said it “squeezed the hope out”. “We were so determined to show how bad it was that we forgot people wanted something to look forward to as well.”