Keir Starmer has said that his former chief of staff Sue Gray “wasn’t the right person for the job”. In an interview for the Observer with Tom Baldwin, who wrote the Prime Minister’s authorised biography last year, he expressed regret about appointing the senior civil servant to the position. Gray left the role less than a hundred days after coming into Government, and was replaced by Number 10’s Head of Political Strategy, Morgan McSweeney.

Starmer claimed during the interview that opinion within his team was divided over Gray’s appointment, saying: “Not everyone thought it was a good idea when I appointed her.” He added: “It was my call, my judgment, my decision, and I got that wrong. Sue wasn’t the right person for this job.”

Gray was the target of sustained negative briefings during her short stint, which many of her supporters attributed to McSweeney. She was accused of “hoarding power” and “not being sufficiently political”, and her £170,000 salary — more than than Starmer’s — was leaked to the press. Her backers blamed this negative coverage on a “boys’ club” centred around McSweeney. Former cabinet secretary Simon Case told the BBC this week that Gray’s appointment was “deeply unusual”, and that her move “was a source of enormous controversy within the Civil Service”.

Starmer has not previously spoken so explicitly about his former chief of staff’s departure. While she was initially offered the post of Envoy to the Nations and Regions after her departure from Downing Street, Gray turned it down. In December, two months after her departure from frontline politics, she was made a Labour peer and now sits in the House of Lords.

The PM also addressed his controversial speech about immigration reform last month, and in particular his claim that Britain is becoming an “island of strangers” which saw him compared to Enoch Powell. Starmer told the Observer: “That particular phrase — no, it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it.” This echoed an interview with the New Statesman earlier this month in which Starmer was described as “clearly regretting the speech”.

His regrets were not isolated to the speech itself, but also to the preface of the policy document which came with it. In it, Starmer said that high immigration numbers under the previous government had caused “incalculable damage” to the country, and that the Conservatives had conducted “a one-nation experiment in open borders”. In this week’s interview with Baldwin, he said that while his party “became too distant from working-class people on things like immigration”, “this wasn’t the way to do it in this current environment”.

It comes as the government has changed its mind about several major policies in the last month. Following a rebellion of over 120 Labour MPs, Starmer was last night forced to accept amendments to his welfare reform bill which aimed to cut Government expenditure on disability benefits. He earlier changed Labour’s position on a grooming gangs inquiry following Baroness Casey’s audit on the scandal, and performed an about-turn on the removal of the winter fuel payment for pensioners, leading to headlines highlighting a “Hat Trick of U-Turns”.

In a speech last year, the PM told the country: “Things would get worse before they get better”. Starmer now admits this “squeezed the hope out” and that “we were so determined to show how bad it was that we forgot people wanted something to look forward to as well”. He acknowledged to Baldwin: “If there’s one thing about me, it’s that I learn.”

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Jack Davey is a freelance writer. He writes on Substack.

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