LABOUR has claimed that the latest row over the appointment of Partygate investigator Sue Gray as chief of staff to leader Sir Keir Starmer is Tory electioneering.
On the Cabinet Office inquiry into her appointment, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told GB News: “I’ve got a lot of confidence that everyone has done the right thing. There is an official process here. It’s independent, everything will be in the public domain.
“The schedule for that is completely within the power of that committee. It deals with all civil service appointments to outside roles and I think we just wait and see what they say.
“The attempt by the government to try and make this a story a couple of days before the local elections by making a statement on it today, if they think this is the big issue this country’s thinking about, talking about right now, I think they’re sorely mistaken.”
In a discussion with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, he added: “I would just remind everyone, she wasn’t the original person investigating these Partygate scandal allegations.
“It was somebody else he unfortunately had to resign because he’d been at the party he was supposed to investigate.
“We don’t know the timeline, this will all be in the public domain when the committee is called.”
He added: “Civil servants taking other jobs outside the civil service as they move on with their careers. It’s not unusual.
“We’ve even had several high profile government ministers in recent times who themselves were originally civil servants when that began. So there’s nothing special or unusual about this and any legitimate interest there is because of these Conservative scandals and her role as head of ethics having to investigate some of these things that will be in the public domain.
“I’m more than confident everyone has followed the proper process with this.”
