Silent Knives and Velvet Gloves

The utility of Sue Gray

Silent Knives. Let us imagine that you are a Conservative version of Morgan McSweeney. Like Morgan, you conclude that forming a new party would lock you out of Government for at least a decade. You have a pathological hatred of the Left, underwritten by a Pragmatic understanding that they are electorally toxic, and you have no qualms about methodically wrecking their political careers.

You manage to attach yourself to a regional solicitor with a hunger for Power, and you are sat in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office in January 2025 with some discretion over candidate selections and wider political strategy. Crucially, you have access to the dark spreadsheets held by the whips office on different MPs in your own party, and a small team of people at your disposal who are trying to expand this source of information. This is essentially where Morgan McSweeney was in late 2020.

It still remains the case that the ‘one-nation’ wing of the Tory Party is the single biggest problem in British Politics. The Rwanda Scheme could be chuntering along right now if not for these people, they had to be deselected to Get Brexit Moving.

Before the election I advocated for a mass expulsion of One Nation Conservative MPs by pushing forward toxic legislation that they would be forced to vote against (and with the opposition), and withdrawing the whip in it’s totality. In opposition this is much more difficult, partly because you no longer have the initiative of being in Government, but also because the very small overhang that the Conservative Party has over the Liberal Democrats.

The Conservative Party only has 49 more seats than the Lib Dems. That means that if you withdrew the whip from 25 wet MPs, they could simply defect to the Lib Dems and you would no longer lead the opposition. No leader could survive this event. It simply isn’t credible. Your funding will disappear and you will be kicked out by flailing MPs.

One aspect of party politics that I do not think that Westminster has yet understood is the transformative change that Sue Gray will bring to ‘ethics and probity’, and the contempt that she and her fellow travellers have towards elected representatives. The most powerful woman in the country has immediately brought forward legislation to allow seventy-year-old veterans to be prosecuted in the courts as a way of appeasing the IRA.

She is humiliating Morgan McSweeney by moving his office around, further away from Keir Starmer and blocking his political appointments. A Labour civil war has begun and Morgan McSweeney’s fall from power will be the event that demarcates ‘Guido Westminster’ from what will follow. McSweeney will spend the next month ‘briefing’ various legendary ‘gamekeepers-turned-poachers’ from the ‘Back Boris’ campaign about how ‘calls are rising’ - she will respond by using her Deep State connections to crush him. She will ‘find’ hitherto unreleased legally compromising information (likely leaking) and use it to begin a purge of Special Advisors who she has long detested. All of the colourfully clad hacks will stand by on College Green braying impotently while the Civil Service is given a statutory footing and Ministerial Departments have their authority torn away.

While Sue Gray is an existential threat to Britain, her viciousness can also be utilised to other ends. Take the project of purging the Conservative Party. Instead of having to openly confront the Woke Wing, an advisor could simply leak compromising information held in the Whips office to Gray’s commissars about selected MPs, and watch as they are forced out of their seat for failing to conform to ‘expectations’ about conduct in public office. Scandal will no longer mean embarrassing headlines, it will mean removal from Parliament.

With control over selections, you could start filling these seats with your own ‘Starmtroopers’ - moderately intelligent, mostly bland and, most importantly, loyal. You could also use this as an opportunity to remove some of the most egregious Cameron A-Listers, any remaining ‘heavyweights’, and anyone who is associated in the public mind with the old regimes. With five years of patient hard work, you could probably turn over 50-60% of the Parliamentary Party and put forward a cohesive Andreessen-esque Manifesto which repudiates the Egalitarian Principle, gets those blimming houses built and tears up bogus Human Rights.