There is a serious problem at 10 Downing Street, but it isn’t Sue Gray v Morgan McSweeney | Rafael Behr

Westminster is witnessing an outbreak of Torschlusspanik . The translation from German is “panic at the gate shutting”, commonly associated with age: the dread of missing opportunities that will never come again.

That might sound like a perverse anxiety to find around a new government basking in a glow of abundant potential. But this is also the moment when vague ambitions of opposition collide with hard choices. Informal networks are formalised, chains of command tighten. Unofficial relationships are mediated by officials. Gates close.

As the volume of urgent decisions increases, time feels scarcer and, in the inner sanctum of government, so does space. Everyone who has worked in No 10 agrees that it is a magnificent Georgian relic, ludicrously inappropriate for running a modern state. Business is done in ornate function rooms and converted cupboards. The labyrinth of stairwells and corridors is perfect for the dispersal of collegiate spirit and the cultivation of paranoia.

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, commented in his memoir that allocating desks in Downing Street was more fraught than negotiating peace in Northern Ireland. Influence is measured by proximity to the boss. Stories of disquiet on that front are already emerging from Keir Starmer’s administration.

It has been reported that Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff, has ensured that Morgan McSweeney, the head of political strategy, be relocated further from the prime minister. It is alleged also that Gray has clashed with Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, over McSweeney’s access to a secure Whitehall computer system and, more generally, that she wields excessive control over meetings and appointments. Officials fret that vital government business is caught in a traffic jam outside Starmer’s office and that Gray’s desk is the roadblock.

Those frustrations are being narrated as a tale of rival power bases and a faultline that threatens seismic destabilisation of the regime.

McSweeney is a veteran operator of Labour machine politics, and is credited with masterminding a massive election victory . Gray is a former civil servant, hired relatively late on Starmer’s journey to Downing Street, who was tasked with bringing rigour to preparations for government. Winning campaigns and rolling out policy are different modes of politics that were relatively easy to separate in opposition. The McSweeney and Gray channels operated for the most part in silos, with occasional but manageable tension between them. The former had precedence at first because seizing power was a precondition for using it. When forming a government, there is a natural reversal. The question of how to deploy power in the present term supersedes the politics of securing a second one.

Senior Labour figures who know both of the prime minister’s two closest aides insist that reports of a schism are wildly overblown, born of speculation by people who underestimate their alignment in loyalty to the Starmer project.

No one can identify a significant divergence on matters of ideology or strategy. McSweeney is more attentive to the challenge of retaining former Conservative voters who might be lured away to rightwing populism, while Gray is more focused on delivery of the manifesto in Whitehall. But those are two sides of one Starmerite coin. The unifying belief is that competent government with results that are felt in voters’ pockets and visible in their communities is the only reliable method for rehabilitating faith in mainstream politics and persuading voters to stick with the ruling party.

That isn’t to say that Gray’s methods cause no irritation. She acquired a reputation for hoarding power in the civil service before she was poached by Starmer. It is easy to envisage frustration now being vocalised by officials and departmental special advisers (or those who expected to become spads and find their appointments blocked). It is amplified in a media climate so accustomed to a diet of wild factional infighting that stable government tastes unbearably bland. The conveyor of spicy news confections serving Conservative newspapers has stopped turning. Something needs to fill the available space.

This is the sound of Torschlusspanik. People who are used to being in the loop find themselves on the wrong side of a closing gate. They resent the gatekeeper. Gray’s defenders can also list traits liable to elicit hostility in some Westminster circles regardless of professional capability. She is a woman from a working-class family who took the less travelled road to the top of the civil service, joining straight from school – a trajectory liable to put fast-tracked, elite-educated male noses out of joint. Not having done infantry duty in the trenches of Labour activism might also count against her in the parliamentary party.

If Gray is staunching the flow of people and paper into Starmer’s office, it is because he trusts her to do the necessary triage. Without it, he would be overwhelmed by the tide of problems that can saturate a prime minister’s attention.

This is a problem of excessive centralisation of power in Britain, coupled with archaic central structures that are designed (or rather, fell into place in a different century) for managing a much smaller state at a much more leisurely pace.

Our political culture assumes that prime ministers are all-powerful, while holders of that office soon discover that the levers they pull aren’t connected to anything that delivers actual change.

Dread of something going wrong in a policy blind spot forces Downing Street to impose an iron grip on other departments, avoid delegation and mistrust local authorities. But the frenzy of too few people trying to keep tabs on everything all at once makes strategic, far-sighted government impossible.

As a report for the Institute for Government put it earlier this year: “No 10 is underpowered but compulsively involved in detail, with ambiguous structures that undermine the clarity of instruction from the prime minister and encourage infighting.” Dysfunction is baked in by the lack of any transition period from one administration to the next. Defeated prime ministers are evicted the morning after an election and their successors are expected to have a government up and running by the end of the weekend.

Various attempts have been made to rationalise the structure and rearrange the layout. Delivery and strategy units have been formed, disbanded and reinvented. But the intensity of the workflow overwhelms even competent administrators. Incompetent ones are ripped apart in a vortex of self-perpetuating crisis.

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Sam Freedman, a former government adviser, makes the point elegantly in his recent book , Failed State: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Faulty institutions can turn transient disputes into durable enmities. Minor fissures become serious fractures.

The origin of rumbling disquiet at the way No 10 is operating under Starmer is unlikely to be the new arrivals shuffling their desks. It is more usefully interpreted as the structural groan of the old building struggling, as it always does, to cope with the pressure of modern government.

Given how quickly other priorities pile in on a new prime minister, it is tempting to postpone thinking about this stuff. It is easy to attribute predecessors’ failures to deficiencies of character or ideology. But history counsels that effort put into organising the flow of power at and away from the centre has a huge impact on whether a government leaves any kind of legacy. And the earlier the better. The gate is already closing.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist