Sue Gray, Director General, Propriety and Ethics Team in Cabinet Office will take up a new role as the as Permanent Secretary at the Department of Finance. Described by some as The most powerful person you’ve never heard and going by the nickname ‘Deputy God‘ many as seeing this as the government gearing up for direct rule. She has family connections in Northern Ireland so maybe she just fancied a break from London, who knows. You can live a great lifestyle in Belfast on a salary of 140k.
Rather bizarrely she once ran a pub outside Newry. The Times reports:
Sue Gray, 60, who also oversaw the Plebgate inquiry, took an unusual “career break” in the 1980s, running The Cove public house near Newry with her husband, Bill Conlon, a country and western singer.
The pub, popular with both Protestants and Catholics, was less than 10 miles from the Irish border in a region so violent it was dubbed “Bandit Country”. It has since closed down.
“She was a good landlady,” said Adrian Fegan, who drank at the pub when Gray owned it with her husband.
It will be a novelty having a civil servant with experience of running a business in the real world. I wish her the best of luck.
I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism, I am not a member of any political party. Oddly for a member of the Slugger team, I am not that interested in daily politics, preferring to write about big ideas in society. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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