No.10 is short of “policy heavyweights”, former cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell has warned.
Lord O'Donnell, who was cabinet secretary from 2005 to 2011, was asked on BBC Radio 4 if he was alarmed at a “lack of grip" in Downing Street following Sue Gray’s departure as Keir Starmer's chief of staff last weekend.
Gray, who spent most of her career in the civil service and left her role as second permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office in March 2023 to join Starmer’s team, quit on Sunday, saying "intense commentary" around her position "risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change".
Gray has been replaced by Morgan McSweeney, who was Starmer's chief adviser and masterminded Labour’s general election campaign. Starmer has also appointed two deputy chiefs of staff: Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson; and a principal private secretary, Nin Pandit, to head up his private office.
O’Donnell told the World at One: "I think there is definitely a problem there in that this is a loss all round. It's a loss for Sue Gray, of her job, and it's a loss for the government in her abilities. And I do think there is a need for No.10 to have a lot more heavyweights in there – a lot more policy heavyweights.”
The former cab sec added that, during the New Labour era, there were “very senior members of the policy unit, people like David Miliband, Geoff Mulgan, Andrew Adonis”.
“They're not there at the minute, and I think that that is a shortfall,” O’Donnell added.
In July, Starmer appointed Stuart Ingham, a longstanding ally in the Labour Party, as director of the No.10 Policy unit.
Miliband, Mulgan and Adonis ran the unit successively between 1997 and 2004 under Tony Blair, with Miliband and Adonis later becoming ministers under Blair and Gordon Brown.