As metaphors for the dynamic in Keir Starmer’s party go, it is difficult to beat.
A few weeks ago, as debate raged over the fate of the party’s £28 billion green investment pledge, Lord Alli, the increasingly influential Labour peer and media entrepreneur, hosted a dinner at his Covent Garden home. Sir Tony Blair and Sue Gray were sitting next to each other.
One: the former prime minister whose political acumen and relentless message of reassurance on the economy paved the way for the party’s return to power in 1997, and who has the ear of Starmer in a way few might have foreseen.
Sue Gray became Keir Starmer’s chief of staff after leading the investigation into the lockdown parties in Downing Street
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
The other: Gray, the civil servant who swapped her role as Whitehall’s enforcer-in-chief for a role as Starmer’s chief of staff
