Why has Sue Gray’s salary stoked unease and vicious briefings?

Good morning. What’s the price of a Downing Street chief of staff? The BBC has revealed that Sue Gray will be paid £170,000, about £3,000 more than the prime minister. It has triggered a great deal of unease and anger within the Labour government.

It has caused unease because there is a feeling that Gray and the Downing Street operation should have been more alive to the political resonance of a political appointee taking a salary higher than that of the prime minister. It has provoked anger because of lingering resentment among special advisers about their own pay settlements. Some more thoughts on that below.

Fade to Gray

One way to see Sue Gray’s £170,000 a year salary is that it is less, in real terms, than Ed Llewellyn was paid when he was David Cameron’s chief of staff, and less, both in real terms and compared with average wage growth, even than Dominic Cummings’ salary in 2020. However, it is not just the salaries of political advisers that have declined in real terms since 2010, the prime minister’s has too. So there is a key difference: neither Llewellyn nor Cummings had salaries that were greater than that of their boss.

You can make an argument — and indeed many FT readers are — that if you aren’t willing to pay a competitive salary you will not get quality candidates. I see the logic here, but I would just make two points.

The first is that, sure, if you compare salaries in politics to their equivalents in the private sector then politicians are coming out badly. But most politicians are either voluntarily taking a pay cut or they have another role in what you might call “socially-oriented” fields, whether as a family lawyer, working for the New Schools Network, working for the Countryside Alliance, working for Dignity in Dying, working for Oxfam, or teaching. In these areas pay is fairly competitive.

In the long term, that Keir Starmer is paid less in real terms in 2024 than David Cameron was in 2010 is a trend that will have implications for who gets into politics, but frankly we are some way off from that point.

It is a real problem in the here and now that MP’s parliamentary offices are not deep enough to properly compete on pay with jobs in government or in much of a third sector, and this makes it much harder than it should be for legislators to scrutinise the government. It is simply untrue for the Conservatives to describe Gray’s pay deal — which is equivalent to what Downing Street chiefs of staff earned for all but the last four years of the Tory government — as “unprecedented”.

But if you look at meaningful comparison points for people who take staff jobs in government — the £176,029 earned by the chief executive of the charity Mencap, who will be unable to pick up the lucrative post-political gigs of a former Downing Street chief of staff, for example — it is not obvious that the upper limit of what you can earn as a political adviser is too low.

Second, the reason why many special advisers are spitting teeth is that unlike Gray, they are not being made pay offers that would bring them up to what, say, Laura Trott, now the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, was earning when she was an adviser to Cameron, in real terms.

Indeed, many of them have been made offers that represented a real-terms pay cut on their salary in May! As a result, many special advisers are leaving the GMB (a Labour-affiliated trades union that, among other industries, represents parliamentary officials and party staff) and joining the FDA (the trade union that represents senior civil servants and special advisers). They are sharing their pay offers with one another via WhatsApp and in general they are becoming more and more irritated. As Lucy Fisher and George Parker report:

Some say they have been offered salaries in government significantly below what they were paid by Labour as advisers in opposition. “We’re being offered salaries in the £60,000s while Tories doing the same jobs were getting salaries in the £80,000s,” said one.

This bad atmosphere leads to vicious briefing to the BBC, far and away the UK’s most important media outlet:

“If you ever see any evidence of our preparations for government, please let me know,” one adviser said.

Nor are these surprisingly low pay offers confined to special advisers making the jump from opposition to government. People being recruited from the charity sector or from elsewhere in the public sector have been made initial offers that would, again, represent a pay cut. This is why, although Gray did not set her own salary, some advisers feel accepting it shows a lack of political nous on her part. Given other advisers are having to renegotiate their own real terms pay cuts, surely, they feel, Gray should have spotted the political problem posed by her own salary.

Uncertainty over pay and contracts is one reason why many outside Whitehall do not yet have clarity over who they need to speak to in order to get a read on where ministers are, politically. Now, it’s true to say that there were similar teething problems in 2010 (then, the arguments over pay were primarily intra-coalition: because the Conservative party had much more cash than the Liberal Democrats in opposition, Conservative advisers went into government with higher salaries).

But a real difference between then and now is that by this point in 2010, those teething problems had been ironed out. And unlike then, these issues are causing a steady increase in internal resentment towards Downing Street and its chief of staff in particular only a month ahead of the government’s first Budget, the event that above everything else could define Labour’s fortunes and political standing.

Now try this

My body is a finely honed instrument, aka I have come down with the conference cold exactly in between Liberal Democrat conference ending and Labour conference beginning. As such, instead of going out to the pictures I stayed in and watched Bardo: False Chronicle of A Handful of Truths, a beautifully directed and shot meditation on dreams and reality. It is on Netflix but sadly is not available as a physical release.

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