The Partygate scandal, which investigates older mandarins, once confronted an armed IRA gang

Investigation of a senior civil servant Downing Street‘s constipation Customers were once confronted by an armed IRA gang trying to hijack her car, The Mail on Sunday may reveal.

Sue Gray ran a pub near Newry Northern Ireland during The Troubles in the 1980s when she was confronted Republican paramilitary groups while driving alone on a country road at night, a friend says.

“She said she caught a bad cold one night and that one of her co-workers wanted to leave early, so she closed the bar,” a friend said.

She took the person home and was returning from South Armagh. She ran into a light in the middle of the road and told her to stop.

At first she thought it was an army, and she didn’t realize the guy was a paramilitary. He told her, “We want a car, get out.”

And she openly refused and said, “No.”

Surprised, he said, “What?” And then he said to her, “Oh, you’re English too?”

Ms Gray, a senior civil servant investigating parties on Downing Street (pictured), once confronted an armed IRA gang trying to hijack her car.

When it looked like the situation was going to escalate, a voice came out of the darkness and said, “This is Sue Gray from The Cove, let’s move on.”

‘Two or three nights later she was working at The Cove and a well-dressed man was at the bottom of the bar talking to people before nodding to her and saying,’ Sue, did you come home last night? ‘

The Cove Bar has been closed for a long time and now has a car dealership.

But the source said Sue Gray was without stupidity a ‘Peggy Mitchell-style landlord’, while her husband Bill Conlon, a country and western singer, preferred to entertain customers.

Her friend said she believes the pub management experience helped Ms. Gray in her previous role as Stormont’s top civil servant at the Treasury from 2018 to last year.

“She ran the show and had a certain charm, but she wouldn’t be happy to suffer fools either,” a friend said. ‘Okay, you knew who the boss was.’

A mandarin from Stormont, who worked in the Northern Ireland Assembly at the same time as Mrs Gray, said she was not afraid to ruffle feathers in the corridors of power.

“She was very much seen as a constructive challenger and it was something that received a series of responses both inside and out,” the former co-worker said.

‘Some people on the outside thought Sue was very different and very warm to her, but on the inside it was fair to say it was mixed.’