We are a day short of Sir Keir Starmer marking 11 weeks as prime minister. His first 76 days have not been easy ones, and it is striking how often they have been dogged by relatively minor stories which have nonetheless contrived to make the new occupant of Downing Street look out of touch, high-handed or even slightly grasping. The most recent brickbat is a report that Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, earns more than her boss, receiving a salary of £170,000.
The mechanics of this have been clumsy: shortly after Starmer took office, he signed off on a shake-up of pay scales for special advisers which was, in truth, long overdue. The net results, however, come together as a toxic mixture: Gray not only outearns the PM, she is paid around £25,000 more than her predecessor, Liam (now Lord) Booth-Smith. Salaries for political advisers, it seems, are rising at a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer is warning Whitehall departments of swingeing cuts in public spending.
If we want the best people, they will have to receive substantial remuneration
This is a communications failure which, while not fatal, is damaging by accumulation. It was somehow fitting that, according to the same story broken by the BBC, the Downing Street director of communications, Matthew Doyle, had initially been offered a more modest £110,000, only later having that raised to £140,000 in line with his predecessors in the Conservative government.
Enoch Powell once said that ‘for a politician to complain about the press is like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea’. He was right: the media may be unfair, unbalanced, trivial or outright hostile, but all politicians have to deal with them. Sir Keir Starmer is no different and he earns no sympathy from me for the waves currently tossing him back and forth. There is, however, another issue beneath the startlingly clumsy news management in No. 10.
This is not a popular opinion, but we underpay our politicians and we underpay their closest advisers. The Prime Minister earns £166,786 a year, as well as benefiting from grace-and-favour accommodation and a decent amount of publicly funded travel. That salary is more than comfortable, and of course it is around five times the national average.
Being prime minister, however, is a crushingly onerous and relentless job: alone among politicians, there is no one to whom you can entirely convincingly pass the buck (though most will try). Whatever Starmer may have hoped about safeguarding his Friday evenings with his family, the premiership is a 24/7 responsibility. The first RAF air strikes against Houthi militants in Yemen took place on a Friday evening – 12 January, when Rishi Sunak was still in office – and crises both international and domestic will not wait.
If for a moment we imagine Sir Keir Starmer as the CEO of a large, sprawling (and rather poorly managed) corporation, his salary seems modest at best. So too is that of his closest personal adviser, the Downing Street chief of staff. Since the role was created in its modern form in 1997, its occupants have often been inseparable from and invaluable to their prime ministers; none more so than former diplomat Jonathan Powell, who served Sir Tony Blair for his entire decade as premier. The United Kingdom is not alone in this public sector parsimony. If we look across to Washington, Donald Trump’s first two chiefs of staff earned $179,700 (£136,200), and there is a White House salary cap of $183,000 (£138,000).
In the private sector, it is very different. Chiefs of staff are now widely seen as vital to how a CEO runs a large organisation, and their average pay in the United States is around $275,000 (£208,000). Successful incumbents will command a much higher reward: John Rogers, chief of staff to the board of directors at Goldman Sachs, receives a dizzying total compensation of $10,970,400 (£8.3 million).
No one seriously suggests that the civil service can, let alone should, match the private sector in terms of salary. But it is equally a false economy to expect our officials to work solely for the satisfaction of their service. If we want the best people, then the top three or four advisers to the head of government will have to receive substantial remuneration. That would have to be accompanied by open and transparent recruitment and rigorous performance management, although in an ideal world those would be in place anyway.
I understand that public trust in politics is at an all-time low. Politicians and officials bear much of the responsibility for that. Eventually, though, we as voters have to ask ourselves whom we are spiting by paying less than comparable or junior jobs elsewhere and begrudging every single penny. There is truth in the old adage that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
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