Breaking: Gray resigns (to cushy new job) as Starmer promotes McSweeney back to chief of staff

McSweeney ran Labour Together, which didn’t declare hundreds of thousands in donations – who better to take over in the middle of a freebies-for-access scandal?

Former civil servant Sue Gray has resigned as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, as Starmer reshuffles his back office team. He has promoted Morgan McSweeney back to being his chief of staff – a position McSweeney held until 2021. The London-born Gray has been appointed as Starmer’s ‘envoy to the regions and nations’.

Starmer is mired in an escalating ‘freebies for access’ scandal in which he, his wife and front-benchers accepted tens of thousands in designer clothes, with Starmer also accepting the use of a multi-millionaire’s £18m penthouse apartment worth £100,000 and possibly considerably more (though only declared as just over £20,000), and Starmer’s most senior Cabinet members declaring clothes as ‘office support’ – all while keeping 1.5m children in poverty and condemning thousands of pensioners to freeze to death.

McSweeney previously ran hard right pressure group Labour Together, which has been outed orchestrating the antisemitism smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn that contributed to Corbyn’s defeat in the 2019 general election. Labour Together was also fined for failing to declare over £700,000 in donations it received during this period – which surely makes McSweeney the obvious choice to run an office during a donations and cronyism scandal and speaks volumes about Starmer’s contempt for public outrage.

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