Gray Areas

Keir Starmer has not appointed Sue Gray because she is left-wing. He has appointed her because he is not. Held up as the politically neutral "centre ground", with no attempt to explain how it could be both, these people's violently extreme and extremely violent ideology is not even within mainstream public opinion. But there is rarely any realistic way of voting against it, and in any case these are always the defining prejudices of the permanent functionaries.

Of course Boris Johnson lied to Parliament, but of course Harriet Harman's committee is a kangaroo court, and of course Gray's report is not worth the paper on which it is written. A pox on the lot of them. If Gray had not been engaged in a highly politicised coup against Johnson, then why did last year's comings and goings end in the coronation of a Prime Minister who had himself been given a fixed penalty notice for his attendance at a Downing Street party? Not that Johnson was blameless. If Matt Hancock should go to prison, and he should, then so should Johnson. But even so.

Much is being made of the claim that Gray "loyally" served seven Prime Ministers, but she was certainly not loyal to Johnson, and the money markets probably got in before her against Liz Truss. Unlike those markets, imagine what Gray would have done to Jeremy Corbyn. Many years ago, I applied for a lowest level desk job with the Labour Party, and there was a space on the form in which you had to write your party membership number. Gray already has one, or this appointment would be unconscionable. Either that, or Starmer considers that no one in his party is capable of being his Chief of Staff. Which is it?

And who the hell is Sue Gray? Since this appointment was announced, then it has become the Authorised Version that she was born and raised in London, but her accent will need some polishing in order to keep that one up, because everyone had always assumed that she was obviously from Northern Ireland, although no one knew where, exactly. She still has two possible years of birth. This is "the woman who runs the country", and she will soon be running the Labour Party.

Many years before she ran either, her fiefdom was a public house in Newry. We are expected to believe that it was normal in the 1980s for a civil servant to take such a "career break" in an IRA stronghold, before resuming a seamless rise through the permanent British State. The IRA once declined to hijack her car because its members had recognised her, so it seems highly unlikely that she came across as remotely English, and that incident should be seen in the context of the very high level of intelligence penetration of that organisation.

As should the arrest of four Protestants, at least one with known Loyalist paramilitary connections, in relation to the attempted murder of Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell. One shies away from this kind of thing, but there has always, always, always been a school of thought that the New IRA was a false flag operation. These arrests are one of three stories in the last week that the spooky media can barely bring themselves to mention, along with the devastating submissions to the Spycops Inquiry, of which there are even more to come, and findings of the Manchester Arena Inquiry, although even those managed to miss out the worst stuff of all.

If there ever could be a good time to be trying to make a spycop Prime Minister, then this is not it. But they are. After all, while a Head Boy of Winchester knows the rules, if he was only Goldman Sachs then he can never know the facts, but a Director of Public Prosecutions is the icing on the cake. The cherry on top is the woman who kept the Loyalist paramilitary safe house behind IRA lines in 1980s Newry, and they do not even have to get her elected.

"They" are the beneficiaries of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, of the Nationality and Borders Act, of the Elections Act, and of the staggering Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, soon to be joined by the even more stunning Public Order Bill, by the Online Safety Bill, by the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, and by the National Security Bill.

They are already so convinced that Starmer is going to win a General Election in December 2024 that they are openly staffing his office at the very highest levels. The opinion polls bear no resemblance to Labour's abysmal electoral performance under Starmer, so ask yourself how the spooks could possibly be so certain. Yet they are. Think on.