Gray 'gets the job done' - but always respects processes, says former Labour minister

Shaun Woodward – a former Northern Ireland Secretary – worked with Sue Gray when she was a civil servant, during Gordon Brown’s government. “I only know her to be a person of the greatest integrity, and somebody who entirely upholds process – which means a very major respect for following the way things should be done”.

He said that having worked with her in her time at the Cabinet Office, she was instrumental in ministerial appointments and cabinet reshuffles – and a “real stickler, in the best sense, for doing it correctly and with due process”.

Since then, Sue Gray controversially left the civil service to take up a political role running the Labour shadow cabinet, and now the cabinet.

“What’s being implied in [the Times story] is not, in any shape or form, the work of the Sue Gray that I know. I would be very surprised if when the facts are properly examined – and when something which might have been taken out of context is put back in context and process – I would be surprised if Sue Gray in any shape or form has done anything that we would regard as not entirely proper and respectful of the proper processes”, Mr Woodward said.

He added the allegation that Sue Gray had “subverted” the work of the cabinet was “not the work of the Sue Gray that I have had many years of working with and whose integrity I hold very high indeed”.

He suggested that the facts of the case have yet to emerge, but that disgruntled elements of the outgoing administration may be seeking to damage Sue Gray’s reputation.

“She knows how to get things done, but she doesn’t do them by cutting corners and being disrespectful of the process and the individuals in that process – it’s just not her”, he said.