The recent outbreak of Sturm und Drang at Westminster has now calmed down. Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sue Gray, is off, perhaps never to return. The experiment is over, but not before a whole catalogue of accusations and unsubstantiated criticisms was unleashed. “Not political enough”, was one of the charges. Too slow to spot problems and deal with them. Didn’t run the “grid” of news announcements well… although was that really the job for a veteran civil servant with minimal media experience?
While the dust may have settled on this latest episode, it would be wrong to move on without discussing one of the unacknowledged and under-discussed aspects of this unhappy saga: the clash of generations in the workplace, in this case the ultra high-pressure workplace called Number 10 Downing Street.
One ally of Gray was clear what had happened, and told the Times about it: “You simply can’t have a lot of out-of-control special advisers ousting a chief of staff,” this friend said. Another Labour party figure said: “What you’ve seen is a ‘players’ revolt’ in Number 10 and now they’re in charge.”
While the details are still contested, it seems clear that many special advisers were unhappy with the way they were being treated. Their Conservative party predecessors had been paid as much as £20,000 a year more to do a similar job. Contracts and terms and conditions had not been confirmed. There were also fewer of them, facing a huge workload. When Morgan McSweeney held his first meeting with the special advisers after taking up the chief of staff role, he apologised for the situation, promised to resolve it and received a warm round of applause.
Sue Gray comes from a working-class background and is in her mid 60s. She has more than three decades of experience of public service behind her. I am guessing that she feels £60,000 a year is a pretty decent salary for someone with much less experience working in the public sector. It would put you nearly among the top 10 per cent of earners in the UK. (Although it did emerge, somehow, that she was getting paid £170,000 a year, slightly more than the prime minister’s own salary.)
If you are in your mid 60s, even pretty grown-up people in their 30s and 40s might come across to you as relatively junior. You might not respond well to apparent ingratitude, or worse. Perceptions and “lived experience” vary according to age. A graduate in their 30s will still probably be paying off quite a big student loan, and will also be having to find a lot of money to pay rent or a (large) mortgage. Unless they are being supported by the bank of mum and dad, life in an expensive city will be a financial struggle. Eliza Filby has explored this terrain in her new book Inheritocracy.
Some colleagues will feel more equal than others, and these underlying tensions are bound to play out at work, which is now home to several generations. A former boss set out their concerns in a recent piece for the Daily Mail.
“I felt wildly out of my depth with a generation of work staff that I neither understood nor, in the end, wanted to,” this ex-manager wrote. Confronted by “an entire blizzard of snowflakes”, this boss was confused. “They moaned about everything… they also spoke in a weird therapy-speech that made exactly zero sense to me… they constantly needed to ‘speak their truth’…”
There has to be some give and take in a high-pressure working environment, even when, as in central government, there is so much at stake. In the post-Covid world we are all having to relearn how to get on with each other in the confined space of the office. Genuine diversity at work has to include age diversity, and mutual tolerance and respect for people from different generations. This is not easy territory to navigate.
Sue Gray may well have thought that the special advisers were out of control, and was quite possibly horrified by the idea. But it is 2024. New people are coming into the workplace. They will be different. They have a lot to offer, and should be accommodated and made to feel welcome. At the same time, patience is a virtue. Careers are built over decades, not months, and we should not all be in too much of a hurry. Where public money is involved, we should have realistic expectations of what levels of pay are likely to be on offer.
Work is a team effort, and we need to work together. The kids are all right. And so, too, are the grown-ups—most of them, anyway.
