A non-political view of Sue Gray

A non-political view of Sue Gray

One of the silly Sunday posts today suggested that a figure was a senior civil servant disguised as Mary Poppins to deliver her report to Downing Street. I couldn’t refrain from comment, as I’ve had some professional dealings with almost equally sensitive material: after a career in internal audit in the public sector, I have a lot of sympathy for Sue Gray, and none for the subjects of her investigation.

It's all very well to talk about 'speaking truth unto power' - but when it comes to it, power is often uninterested in the truth, nor in the rules that govern getting rid of those entrusted with being the conscience of an organisation. It doesn't make the job impossible, but it means that it requires a level of integrity and courage that is way beyond the pay. An additional problem is that civilians don't understand the level of evidence she'll be after. So many people 'know' what happened from a position of ignorance.

Sometimes, the critique gallery feels a bit the same! We get posts from people who do not actually appear to want an objective critique of their work. They tend to take an adversarial view of any comments, and rather than saying what they were trying to do believe us to guess. By us I mean by members of the critique team and those other people were kind enough to add to their thoughts from time to time. It feels like deliberate testing, and occasionally an attempt to sucker us in so that the photographer can ridicule or comments. This feels rather like a detective story that hinges on some previously unrevealed fact, in a way that was banned by British thriller writers back in the 1930s. It brings me joy that the formal statement of these rules was penned by Dorothy L. Sayers author of the Lord Peter Wimsey books.

Going back to Ms Gray, she’s facing another problem that I remember well: the desire of the police to have an open field of action for their own investigation. My view, shared by one or two far more experienced investigators, is that the internal investigation should forge ahead and get the wrongdoers off the payroll as quickly as possible. If they’ve done anything really serious, we’d hand all a material to the police afterwards. Makes you think, dunnit?