Sue Gray has resigned as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.
The former senior civil servant, who left her role as second permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office in March 2023 to join Starmer’s team, said she had left to avoid “becoming a distraction” amid intense briefings about her.
She will now take up a role as the prime minister's envoy for nations and regions.
Gray, who worked on the union and constitution at the Cabinet Office and then-levelling up department before leaving the civil service, said it had been an honour to "play my part in the delivery of a Labour government".
"However, in recent weeks it has become clear to me that intense commentary around my position risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change,” she added.
"It is for that reason I have chosen to stand aside, and I look forward to continuing to support the prime minister in my new role."
Starmer has picked Morgan McSweeney, who was previously chief adviser to Starmer and masterminded Labour’s general election campaign, to replace Gray as his chief of staff.
The move comes alongside a wider shake-up of Starmer’s team.
Starmer has appointed two deputy chiefs of staff, Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson; and a principal private secretary, Nin Pandit, to head up his private office.
Pandit was previously director of the No.10 policy unit and replaces Elizabeth Perelman, who served Rishi Sunak for two years in the director general-level role. Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings once described Pandit as “one of the many brilliant young women I saw around the table who would have been a 10X better PM than [Johnson]”.
Alakeson, a former deputy director of the Resolution Foundation think tank, was Labour’s director of external relations in opposition and entered No.10 as political director. Cuthbertson is a Labour veteran who previously worked for Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, and most recently was Starmer’s director of government relations.
Starmer has also brought in former political journalist James Lyons as director of strategic communications. Lyons was a journalist at the Sunday Times and Daily Mirror and more recently worked in comms for the NHS and then TikTok.