Lord Alli worked with Sue Gray on the timetable of announcements for Labour’s first 100 days in power, a book has revealed.

       The controversial donor also helped design the job descriptions of Sir Keir Starmer’s special advisers in No 10, according to the book Landslide.

       And he accompanied Ms Gray to important meetings with civil servants in the run-up to the general election, at which Labour’s programme for government was discussed.

       It underlines the influence of the peer, who has donated thousands of pounds worth of clothes to the Prime Minister.

       After the election he was also given a Downing Street pass, prompting accusations of cash for access.

       Landslide, written by Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth, claims that senior Cabinet and civil service figures have been dismayed that Ms Gray did not do more to prepare Sir Keir’s team for power.

       They wrote that Ms Gray brought in Lord Alli to help with the preparations for power. This involved working on designing both the official grid of announcements and events for the first 100 days in power.

       He is also said to have helped design the organisational structure for Sir Keir’s team of special advisers inside No 10.

       The book also states that before the election, Lord Alli accompanied Ms Gray to “access talks”, where shadow ministers give government officials notice of their priorities.

       In previous years, access talks have begun as much as 18 months before polling day, and Rishi Sunak gave permission to allow Labour to begin the discussions with the civil service in January 2024.

       But what talks took place were often minimal and took place in extreme secrecy.

       The book claims that when the election was called, Sir Keir’s team were “caught out by the timing” and scrambled to intensify the talks with civil servants, one person familiar with the matter recalled.

       “We did accelerate the pace,” one of the ministers now in the Cabinet said. “We had to rapidly move through things.”

       Ms Gray was claimed to be among the senior party officials most reluctant to see ministers engage in comprehensive access talks.

       Another senior minister confessed that their access talks consisted of just one 30-minute conversation with a senior civil servant.

       “We were told not to speak to other teams about what we were doing,” the first Cabinet minister said. “We were at one level saying, ‘we’ve got to be ready for the election at the same time as the local elections in May,’ but then we were also saying, ‘there’s no need to have access talks’. Those two things were totally contradictory.”

       The excuse that the party bosses gave to frustrated underlings was that they did not want to look like they were taking victory for granted or be seen to be “measuring up the curtains”.

       Labour and the Cabinet Office were approached for comment.