Sue Gray did not inform ministers of any contact with Labour figures to discuss her new job – even though it is a requirement under civil service rules.
Last week, Ms Gray resigned as second permanent secretary at the Department for Levelling-Up, Housing and Communities and the Cabinet Office, allowing her to take up a role with Sir Keir Starmer as his chief of staff.
Under civil service rules, she should have declared any meetings she had with Opposition figures to the ministers in her departments – Michael Gove and Oliver Dowden.
However, it is understood that Ms Gray did not inform them of any meeting.
The appointment is controversial because Ms Gray investigated the lockdown parties in Downing Street, and her report contributed to the departure of Boris Johnson.
Labour has declined to say when talks began, although her predecessor in the role of chief of staff left in November.
Ms Gray’s application to Acoba, the appointments watchdog, will be submitted on Monday, and Labour sources indicated she would have to reveal when talks with Sir Keir began.
It is not known whether Acoba will take into account her failure to inform ministers of meetings when it decides whether to recommend a lengthy delay before she can take up her new job.
It emerged on Sunday that Ms Gray had been in the running to be permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade last autumn.
The Sunday Express said Kemi Badenoch, the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, backed her appointment, but that the promotion was apparently blocked by Simon Case, the Cabinet secretary.
On Sunday, Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said Ms Gray’s name had been connected to the chief of staff role “weeks” ago.
Mr Ashworth was unable to say whether she had made senior Government figures aware of her conversations with his party.
The Directory of Civil Service Guidance states: “As a general principle, there is no objection to contacts between senior civil servants and leading members of the Opposition parties if the latter wish to inform themselves about the factual questions of departmental organisation or to keep abreast of organisational changes.
“Such contacts should always be cleared with departmental ministers.”
In an interview with the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Mr Ashworth could not answer when asked three times about when conversations started between Ms Gray and his party leader, as he was “not privy to HR decisions”.
“First of all, we know that Keir Starmer has for several weeks now been looking for someone to fill this role,” Mr Ashworth said.
“She was always going to be on the list when we knew there was a vacancy that emerged. She’s quite rightly going to go through a process. There’s proper procedures in place when a senior civil servant leaves the civil service and I’m sure she’ll set it all out when she has those conversations.”
On the prospect of whether Ms Gray had followed the rules, Mr Ashworth repeated he had not been “privy to the conversations” and added the mandarin “will outline all of this in the proper way, which will follow the procedures”.
“You’re asking me to speculate on something when I’ve not been privy to the conversations … You are asking to engage in a hypothetical, if I may say so.”
Asked by Ms Kuenssberg if it would matter if Ms Gray “did not follow the rules to the letter”, Mr Ashworth replied: “I’m confident that Sue Gray is a woman of immense integrity, and she will set all of this out as she follows the proper processes and procedures – as one does when you’re a senior civil servant and you leave the civil service.”
Speaking on the same programme, Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland Secretary, urged Sir Keir to publish all of his correspondence with Ms Gray.
“Labour politicians, in the past, have raised lots of questions about civil servants who’ve immediately moved into positions on the other side of the fence,” Mr Heaton-Harris said.
“So I think the simplest way to solve this situation is for Keir Starmer just to publish all the information or all the messages and stuff they had with Sue Gray at that time.”
Civil servant reminder
Earlier this week, The Telegraph revealed Susan Acland-Hood, permanent secretary at the Department for Education, reminded civil servants they “should tell your permanent secretary right away” if they received contact from any shadow cabinet politician.
It came as Sir Jake Berry, the former Conservative chairman, warned Ms Gray’s application was “just another brick in the wall” in undermining public trust in Whitehall.
Speaking to Camilla Tominey, The Telegraph’s Associate Editor, on her GB News programme, Sir Jake said: “It’s this appearance of bias, this sort of appearance that Boris Johnson may have been subject to the biggest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry.”
Labour confirmed earlier this week that Ms Gray had been offered the job, but refused to say how long Sir Keir had been courting her for the role.
The party admitted they had known each other since its leader was the Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.
Labour sources also pointed to reports that Sir Keir wanted his new chief of staff to be more involved in “transition to government planning” than “campaign planning”, and that he had always wanted a senior civil servant to succeed Sam White, who departed in November.
The party denied Ms Gray had been approached “because [Sir Keir] somehow wanted government gossip”, and insisted she had kept secrets on behalf of a number of different political parties while working in Whitehall.
