A few months back, when he was chasing your vote, Sir Keir Starmer stood at a lectern, rolled up his sleeves and promised that Labour would ‘clean up politics’ and ‘restore standards in public life with a total crackdown on cronyism’.
It was a time when his power-hungry party was investing significant political capital in the war on what he invariably dubbed ‘Tory sleaze’.
Prime Minister’s Questions might see Sir Keir jab a finger across the Despatch Box to accuse the Conservative government of giving ‘kickbacks’ to donors, or enriching political supporters by signing off what he once called ‘dodgy contracts, jobs for their mates and cash for access’.
The calculated line of attack, endlessly amplified by Starmer’s front-bench allies and their stenographers in the Left-wing media, was designed to convince voters that the ‘nasty party’ had snouts in the trough.
‘We will stamp out Tory sleaze that has polluted our politics and corrupted our democracy,’ Angela Rayner would bellow, complaining about what she called ‘cronyism in Parliament’.
In one memorable broadside, she accused the Government of handing out ‘jobs for the boys’ after discovering that a journalist named Harry Mount, who’d once written a book on the ‘wit and wisdom’ of Boris Johnson, was up for a role on the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
‘This is a display of pure arrogance,’ she declared. ‘Putting a leading crony in charge of rooting out cronyism in Parliament! Sleaze and self-interest have defined their government for years.’
During his election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer, here pictured with Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner (left) and Chancellor Rachel Reeves, promised to ‘clean up politics’
Rayner’s comrade Rachel Reeves, then Shadow Chancellor, was similarly anxious to ‘clean up cronyism’ in British politics firing off angry public letters to, as she put it, ‘demand transparency from this Government on how it’s appointing senior figures’.
When, a couple of years back, a Tory peer, Lord Wharton, was hired to run the Office for Students, Reeves reached for the smelling salts. ‘This government’s philosophy is so often not appointing the best person for the job but the best friend for the job,’ she complained.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was then.
Today, Starmer, Rayner and Reeves find themselves atop the wobbly ladder of Westminster. And suddenly, all those wide-eyed pledges to end ‘cronyism’ look very hollow indeed.
How so? Well, in a shameless display of hypocrisy, Labour has spent its first weeks in office quietly parachuting a motley selection of donors, activists, aides and former party employees into publicly-funded jobs within the supposedly neutral civil service.
The hiring spree is already unprecedented. But fresh details are still coming to light, with more questionable appointments emerging daily. And while it remains to be seen whether rules designed to protect Whitehall neutrality have been broken or merely bent, little about this murky affair passes the smell test.
What I can tell you, for sure, is that – after years of bleating about the evils of ‘cronyism’ – Starmer, Reeves and Rayner are already up to their necks in the scandal. As so often, in this new Government’s short history, the PM’s chief-of-staff Sue Gray has an intriguing, walk-on role.
The controversy began on August 7, when the Westminster news website Politico discovered that Chancellor Reeves had just welcomed a banker named Ian Corfield as a ‘Director of Investment’ at the Treasury.
This appointment, which commands a salary of up to £162,500, had been made in July – but not publicly announced. And there was a further highly irregular detail: this supposed public servant just happened to be a longstanding Labour Party donor who’d handed over £20,000 in recent years, including a handy £5,000 to Reeves herself.
The revelation raised a number of questions. For recruitment to the civil service, especially to its most senior roles, is governed by strict protocols designed to prevent corruption and safeguard Whitehall’s cherished political independence.
Sue Gray might be part of the reason for Labour donors landing plum roles, which started on August 7 when Chancellor Reeves welcomed a banker named Ian Corfield as a ‘Director of Investment’ at the Treasury
They stipulate that departments should hold an ‘open and fair’ recruitment process, allowing candidates to be considered entirely on their merits, rather than party-political affiliation.
No such process took place when Corfield was parachuted into his lucrative role. He was instead employed under ‘exceptions’ allowed only in limited circumstances, such as when hiring someone is considered ‘urgent’ or to appoint distinguished outsiders to senior roles.
Irregular hires, of this nature must be approved by a quango called the Civil Service Commission. It did indeed sign off Corfield’s appointment. But the protocols governing that process mean it wasn’t told he was a Labour donor.
All very whiffy. And questions for Reeves over her generous donor’s new plum role are further complicated by the Ministerial Code, which stipulates that ‘ministers must uphold the political impartiality of the Civil Service’ and ‘ensure that no conflict arises, or could reasonably be perceived to arise, between their public duties and their private interests’.
Quite how the Chancellor of the Exchequer saw ‘no conflict’ in someone who had given her £5,000 being ushered into a well-paid job in her own department is unclear.
While she has yet to comment, some two weeks into the scandal, colleagues have claimed that ‘no rules were broken’ in the whole thing.
That, of course, doesn’t make it right. And Corfield isn’t the only controversial new recruit to the civil service. Indeed, he isn’t even the only one at the Treasury.
For it recently emerged that one Oliver Newton has joined the Department as ‘Head of Business Engagement’. Before the election, he worked as a ‘Business Relations Adviser’ for the Labour party, in the office of that relentless opponent of cronyism, Rachel Reeves.
Ian Corfield, Director of Investment at the Treasury, and Oliver Newton, Head of Business Engagement
Over at Angela Rayer’s Ministry of Housing, meanwhile, similar jobs have been doled out to Labour stooges. For example, a young man named Haydon Etherington was recently hired as a ‘Senior Policy Adviser’ there. His last job, prior to the election, was working for Labour as a policy adviser to none other than Angela Rayner.
Elsewhere in the same building, you may find another new recruit called Ben Wood. He turns out to have spent the past six years working for the Labour Party. Indeed, he was its candidate in the 2021 North Shropshire by-election, when Rayner actually appeared on the stump for him.
After that notably unsuccessful campaign (he came second with 22 per cent of the vote) Wood came to Westminster, where he was hired as Ms Rayner’s ‘political adviser’.
Now Labour are in government, he’s moved seamlessly into her department. As a supposedly neutral civil servant.
Completing a hat-trick of cronyism for the Deputy Prime Minister – who was so critical of Tory ‘cronyism’ – it yesterday emerged that Rose Grayston has been hired to work in Rayner’s department as an expert adviser on housing.
Grayston was previously employed at Labour Together, a think tank that has made donations to a host of Labour MPs, including one Angela Rayner. In a move some might find suspicious, that old role was deleted from her page on the social network LinkedIn a couple of days back.
Haydon Etherington, Senior Policy Adviser in the Housing Department, and Rose Grayston, an expert adviser on housing
Henry Newman, a former Tory aide and author of The Whitehall Project blog, who uncovered the appointments of Wood and Grayston this week, accused Labour of ‘endangering the impartiality of Whitehall through a string of civil service jobs awarded to political figures’.
Whether Deputy Prime Minister Rayner disagrees is unclear. She too has yet to comment on the escalating scandal, or to explain how hiring three Labour loyalists to supposedly neutral civil service roles dovetails with her long-claimed opposition to ‘cronyism in Parliament’ and ‘jobs for the boys’.
The stench of hypocrisy runs all the way to Downing Street, too. For in recent days it emerged that Sir Keir himself, who once promised a ‘total crackdown on cronyism’ has replaced the civil servant who was his diary manager with one Annie-Rose Peterman. She was previously a Labour employee, working for both Starmer and Emily Thornberry.
Starmer’s shadowy Chief of Staff, Sue Gray, has meanwhile parachuted one Mitchell Burns-Jackson into No 10 as her new ‘executive assistant’. It’s a highly irregular move, since such hires are usually made from within Whitehall. Immediately before the election, he was her personal diary secretary, directly employed by the Labour Party.
Ms Gray is up to her neck in the mounting controversy, if senior Conservatives are to be believed.
She features heavily in a formal complaint that Shadow Paymaster General John Glen filed with the Civil Service Commission last week. This document offers an intriguing explanation for some of the egregious cronyism.
It argues that Labour ministers who chose to hire the likes of Ian Corfield would in normal circumstances have given them jobs as Special Advisers, a term describing overtly political staff hired on fixed-term contracts who, unlike civil servants, are not bound by rules governing neutrality.
Mr Glen claims, however, that there has been a problem: namely that Gray, who is famed for her backstage control-freakery (and has been accused of seeking to block intelligence officers from briefing Sir Keir) is refusing to sign off the appointments of these ‘Spads’.
That in turn has prompted the likes of Rayner and Reeves to hire donors and party employees via another means: shoehorning them into civil service roles
‘I understand that the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff has personally blocked a number of special adviser appointments,’ reads Glen’s complaint. ‘I am concerned that this may have led to ministers trying to circumvent the rules by appointing such political advisers as normal civil servants, which do not require 10 Downing Street’s approval.’
Emily Middleton, Director General at the Department for Science and Technology, and Jess Sargeant, deputy director of the Propriety and Constitution Group
Newly hired mandarins at the centre of Glen’s complaint reportedly include Corfield, Newton and Etherington, along with a woman called Emily Middleton, who is a brand new Director General at the Department for Science and Technology.
She previously worked at Labour Together, the same Left-wing think-tank as Rayner’s chum Grayston, and was between January and July this year ‘seconded’ to work for the Labour Party in the office of frontbencher Peter Kyle.
Mr Kyle, who valued her work as a ‘donation in kind’ of some £66,500, is by amazing coincidence now the Secretary of State for Science and Technology.
To put things another way, that means Labour Minister Kyle is now in charge of the very department that has hired Ms Middleton to work in a highly paid role as one of its supposedly ‘neutral’ political servants.
Things are similarly cosy at the Department for Education. Here, the committed meritocrat Bridget Phillipson, who appears to be devoting her reign to dismantling private schools, has just welcomed a new ‘Senior Adviser’ by the name of Tom Crick. He too was hired in July, having previously spent three years working for Labour, in Mrs Phillipson’s own office.
Ben Wood has been hired as Angela Rayner’s political adviser
It is, as they say, a rum old do. And the raft of appointments is causing serious consternation inside Whitehall. Among critics to have spoken publicly is Paul Lever, a retired British Ambassador to Germany and former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. ‘There have over the years been quite a few outside appointments to the Civil Service, almost all distinguished and experienced people selected to do senior jobs,’ he says. ‘But the current Labour appointees have a mostly political background and are performing middle-management roles.’
The Institute for Government, a respected think-tank, meanwhile said this week that Labour bringing ‘politically aligned people into Government outside of the usual routes poses risks to the impartiality of the civil service’. And Lord Moylan, a Tory Peer, accused Labour of riding ‘roughshod over civil service impartiality [by appointing] stooges who are completely enmeshed financially in party funding’.
One of the most contentious appointments, on this front, is surely that of Jess Sargeant, a former staffer at Labour Together.
It emerged this week that she’d been parachuted into a job as deputy director in the Government’s ‘Propriety and Constitution Group’ (PCG) which, ironically, is charged with upholding ethical standards across Whitehall.
The recruitment process was highly unusual, sources in the department have claimed. ‘She just turned up one morning, two weeks ago, having been given the job without it being externally advertised,’ one said.
Sargeant will reportedly now work in the ‘Constitutional Guardianship’ team at the Cabinet Office, dealing with House of Lords Reform. It’s a hugely sensitive topic that will affect the balance of power in Parliament.
But she doesn’t seem to be particularly neutral on the subject. Indeed, she’s previously written essays advocating a Starmer-friendly approach to the Upper House, arguing that hereditary peers ought to be abolished and that ‘the presence of . . . religious representatives in the legislature is not befitting of modern democracy’.
This does not, to put things mildly, suggest Sargeant is ideally equipped to maintain civil service neutrality in her new job. Neither does the fact that, shortly after her contentious appointment, she deleted her online CV from networking website LinkedIn, in what may have been a bid to keep her employment history secret.
We are, all told, in the realm of genuine political scandal. Which makes it all the more surprising that until very recently, Left-leaning media outlets were almost entirely uninterested in the whole thing.
Take the BBC. Although news of Corfield’s appointment was first reported on August 7, generating follow-up articles in the Mail, Times, Telegraph, Financial Times and extensive coverage on LBC radio and across social media, it neglected to touch the story for no fewer than eight days.
‘Since then, its coverage has been extremely limited,’ argues a senior Tory source. ‘If a scandal like this had come along when we were in power, it would have been leading the bulletins and all over Twitter by lunchtime and we’d have push notifications popping up on our phones about “Tory sleaze”. The double standards are quite remarkable.’
Equally shameless has been the silence of Left-leaning lobby groups who have spent recent years bleating about ‘sleaze’ in public office.
Take, for example, the Good Law Project, which runs crowdfunded legal campaigns and – when the Conservatives were in power – campaigned relentlessly against the government handing out ‘jobs for mates’ on the grounds that the practice was supposedly unethical.
At the height of the Covid pandemic, it went so far as to seek a judicial review of the decision by Boris Johnson to appoint Dame Kate Bingham to an unpaid role running the Government’s ‘Vaccine Taskforce’. Although she was one of the UK’s foremost experts on biotechnology, she also happened to be married to a Tory MP, which apparently made her a ‘crony’.
‘Closed recruitment particularly discriminates against Black, Asian and minority ethnic people and disabled people,’ read the Good Law Project’s complaint, prepared in conjunction with a race-relations charity called The Runnymede Trust. ‘The Government’s practice of offering these roles unpaid rules out those without family wealth.’
This disgraceful legal action was quietly dropped after Dame Kate’s pro bono work helped Britain lead the world in vaccine development, saving millions of lives.
Fast forward four years, and with a string of more egregious ‘jobs for mates’ being doled out (none of them to candidates from an ethnic minority) the Good Law Project and Runnymede Trust have chosen to say absolutely nothing.
Different standards apply, it seems, when cronyism is orchestrated by Sir Keir Starmer’s merry band of hypocrites.
