When Sue Gray resigned as the prime minister’s chief of staff last week, she said it was because she “risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change”. They always say something like that. Don’t become the story – that’s supposedly the rule for pretty much anyone other than the prime minister.
The prime minister is allowed to be the story, good or bad, because, by definition, what the prime minister does isn’t a distraction, it’s the thing itself. But anyone else can plead the blameless fact that they’re accidentally distracting everyone from more important things. “Talk of my private life”, “widespread press reports of my cronyism and embezzlement”, “my cut-price hair transplant that went hilariously wrong”, “the relentless clip-clop of my amazing shoes” – such things can become a distraction thanks to the silly media and their inability to just sit still and listen to the barrage of sensibleness that the government is trying to present.
