Sue Gray's Pay Grade

You cannot be paid more than your boss. You just can't be. A banker's bonuses may add up to more than the CEO's salary, but the CEO's baseline pay would always be higher. Have you ever been paid more than your boss? Have you ever been paid less than your subordinate? If Sue Gray is paid more than Keir Starmer, then she is his boss. Unlike him, she can presumably afford to buy her own clothes.

The Official Opposition is asking questions, but not where it matters. Why do MPs have school holidays at all? Or if they must have them, then why can they not hold their party conferences during them? Gray just demanded an extra 30 grand, so she got it. Who the hell is she?

Yes, there will be BBC persons relishing this story while taking rather larger sums of public money, but what sort of argument is that? And so what if Gray is paid about as much, if that, as comparable figures were in the May and Johnson years, adjusted for inflation? The fact that there has been that much inflation destroys any argument for those Premierships as points of reference, or indeed as anything else.