BY STEWART SLATER

There are numerous similarities between sport and politics. Both have elements of soap opera – “who’s up, who’s down?”, they generally have a winner-takes-all approach and they cater to humanity’s tribal need for moral simplicity – our lot have to beat their lot because we are good and they are evil. But most team sports strictly regulate the movement of players between teams. There is a “transfer season” in which such moves happen. Not so politics, however, as shown by the news last week that Keir Starmer, manager of Labour F.C. had put in a shock bid for Government United’s star player, Sue Gray.

Moves between Civil Service and Opposition are not unheard of but never at such a high level. Gray was Second Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office and had become, due to her role in the Partygate scandal, one of the few of that famously discreet breed whom most people in the country could name. And if there is one thing that sporting transfer sagas such as Sol Campbell’s move from Tottenham to Arsenal teach us, few things more enrage partisans than a star moving to their hated rivals.

Thus there ensued an outpouring of fury as those supportive of the government (an ever diminishing number, perhaps) took to the barricades to denounce her lack of impartiality, the risk to security her move created and, in some cases, to rubbish her report into Boris Johnson as a “left-wing stitch-up” – unless you think she was personally photoshopping the Conservative Party’s king over the water into the pictures, that dog, as our American cousins might put it, don’t, unfortunately, hunt.

But every denunciation prompts a defence, so Labour and those creatures of the system who exist solely to extol the bureaucracy and all its works, rallied to her side.

To the explicit charge that, having worked at a senior level, she would be aware of privileged information about policies and personalities which would benefit the Opposition, the defence was that having been a Civil Servant, impartiality was in her bones, and she would know how to behave, not revealing anything she should not. While these things may be true, this defence ultimately amounts to no more or less than, “You’ll just have to trust her”.

Trust is, of course, a praise-worthy trait. As Dr Johnson put it, it is “happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” But, on the other hand, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”

There are rules in place regarding Civil Servants taking new jobs, with approval needing to be granted by ACOBA before employment is accepted. This procedure does not seem to have been followed by Sue Gray – ironically, one other individual who seems to have taken the “back-to-front” approach to the rules was Boris Johnson, so often cast as the shifty yin to her upstanding yang. Indeed, it has been reported that, after the news broke, she failed to return calls for clarification from the Cabinet Office. Equally, there are rules about revealing contacts between Civil Servants and the Opposition, rules which, again, do not seem to have been followed, a cause, according to The Telegraph, of concern to Gray’s former colleagues.

It is notable that, several days after the news broke, we do not, at time of writing, know who contacted whom and when. Given this, is Sue Gray the type of person who deserves the full measure of our faith or should we, like the Americans at the end of the Cold War, “Trust but verify”?

To her defenders, these criticisms carry little weight. She is Sue Gray, Boris-slayer, woman of renowned integrity, moral North Star of SW1. There can be nothing dubious about her actions, because we know that she is not a woman of dubious character. Having worked for years in the field of government ethics, anything she does must, by definition, be ethical.

This is, however, to use the analogy invented by the ferociously bright, if fantastically odd, Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, akin to using a table to measure a ruler rather than a ruler to measure a table. For we do not use the reputation of the doer to judge the righteousness of an action, we use the righteousness of their actions to judge the reputation of the doer. Doing otherwise would rapidly take us to places we would prefer not to go. Taking the argument to its extreme, if Sue Gray is a woman of integrity but was found to have committed murder, would we therefore conclude that killing people was, generally, a good thing to do?

Despite all its obvious flaws, however, this is an approach which appears distressingly frequently in public life. Some (not all – Corbynites despite their tenuous grasp on political and economic reality seem to have a pretty solid grip on the reality of their man’s successor) Labour partisans believe, despite the not inconsiderable amount of evidence to the contrary, that Keir Starmer is a man of integrity and so can never do anything untoward, whether that be having a beer and curry during lockdown, or hiring a senior civil servant. The mere fact of Sir Keir doing something means it must have been the right thing to do. This works for the tribally minded who get to create a black and white narrative in which they are the perpetual goodies and their opponents the perpetual baddies. And it works for the politicians themselves. The former prosecutor is turned into judge and jury when he solemnly intones that nothing improper happened with the recruitment of his new chief of staff.

Nemo iudex in causa sua, however – no-one should be judge in his own case. Despite what partisans may think, there is none of us so pure that we can judge ourselves without bias. Much of the time our motivations are opaque, even to ourselves – some psychologists now believe we evolved reason to provide justifications to our tribe-mates for the decisions our subconscious had already taken. Nor, with the possible exception of some residents of monasteries, do the morally perfect exist. People are a mixture, capable of good and bad. John Profumo dedicated his post-scandal life to charity, Brooks Newmark, a politician who similarly resigned after a misfortune in the trouser department, has, as of the end of last month, evacuated over 21,000 people from war-torn Ukraine. Their subsequent actions do not ennoble their earlier indiscretions, but neither does their previous misbehaviour devalue their later good deeds. If we can update our view of them in the light of their actions, why should we not do the same with Sue Gray?

It is, of course, easy to divide the world into the completely pure and the completely evil. But easy belongs in fairy-tales. In the real world, you’re only as good as your last deed.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.