David Blunkett is no stranger to the dangers of leadership speculation. Countless column inches were spent analysing the psychodrama of Blair vs Brown during the New Labour years. Even now, years later, politicos continue to debate whether Tony Blair should have resigned earlier. Similar speculation has beset Labour’s current leader. Keir Starmer was barely Prime Minister for a year when the rumours about his future in the job began to spread, and now hardly a week goes by without headlines questioning his authority over MPs. But Blunkett, who served as home secretary under Blair, has a simple solution – success.
“I think this picking of immediate potential alternative leaders is destructive to [the government], and it’s undermining Keir Starmer,” he told me. “In the end, Keir Starmer will be leader if he succeeds. People used to pick heavily at Tony Blair, but – because he was so successful – that sniping, throwing javelins, actually didn’t reach its target. So the answer is, we’ve got to do well, collectively. Nobody benefits from [Nigel] Farage winning. That’s the simple truth of the matter, either in local government and in the regions and nations in May, or in a future general election: everybody loses if Labour lose.”
I met Blunkett, who was awarded a peerage in 2015, in the House of Lords. By his feet lay his loyal guide dog Barley, a black retriever German shepherd mix. At 78, Blunkett remains deeply loyal to his party and its leader. But the former big beast had a word of advice for Starmer.
“If I have a 2026 message, it is that that collegiate, common purpose has got to shine through,” he said. “And it does mean that you don’t chop down the tall poppies if people are shining in what they’re doing in their departmental brief. If they’re doing very well, don’t immediately jump on the bandwagon of saying, ‘Oh, they’re doing this because they want to be the alternative leader to Keir Starmer.’ The minute you get into that, the confidence of those around Keir Starmer drops, and they go into a bunker mentality. The opposite should be true.”
Instead of punishing talent, he believes Starmer and his allies should focus on delivery and winning people over. “The answer to the challenges to Keir Starmer’s leadership is success,” he said. “The answer is to start winning people back so that the polls start to change. The possibility of doing much better in May than is currently thought to be the case, in the local elections and in Scotland and Wales, is really important. So have confidence, because, in the end, the antidote to the constant talk and chatter about leadership contests is to make a leadership contest unnecessary.”
It’s a scenario that will be all too familiar to Wes Streeting. Late last year, the Health Secretary was subjected to hostile briefings from inside Downing Street, taking people across Westminster by surprise. Whatever the intention, the episode appeared only to undermine further the Prime Minister’s authority. Streeting, widely regarded as one of Labour’s strongest media performers and among its most effective ministers, was able to weather the resulting media storm – but the incident can’t have been comforting for the wider cabinet.
“I think anyone who is showing real dynamism, and who is getting out there and is shown to be driving the change from the top, is vulnerable to being accused of being a potential alternative,” Blunkett said of the incident. “And if you get into that syndrome, then everyone keeps their head down, and you’ve got the unity of the graveyard.”
The same logic, he suggested, applies to Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary. “I think she’s doing extremely well,” he said. “She’s demonstrated she knows what she wants to do, and she’s showing energy and drive in doing it now. That doesn’t necessarily mean that things immediately change, but if you don’t have that dynamic from the top, then it’s not going to happen.”
Drawing on his own experience at the Home Office, Blunkett stressed the scale of the task. Turning a department around, he said, was “like turning an oil tanker”. What mattered was clarity and trust. If civil servants understood the direction of travel and believed the secretary of state would back them, they would respond.
Leadership chatter surrounding Andy Burnham, Blunkett warned, was also unhelpful. “I think at this moment in time, that it’s a distraction, and I think it’s damaging to Andy,” he said. Despite the Greater Manchester mayor being a long-standing friend, and a former parliamentary private secretary during the New Labour years, Blunkett said Burnham risked being harmed by speculation about his future. “It would be unfortunate if his great success in Greater Manchester was damaged by all the talk about him becoming leader of the Labour Party,” Blunkett said, arguing that the focus should instead remain on delivery and results.
What Labour needed, he said, was not an alternative leader but better messaging from the existing one. Starmer, Blunkett argued, had delivered a great deal in office already, but struggled to communicate it. The task ahead was to sharpen the message around what he called “those three Cs that I’ve spelt out, of competence, of coherence and of connectivity”, so voters could see not only that Labour was governing, but that it was doing so in a way that felt joined up.
Blunkett was clear that Labour should not be afraid of visible talent within its ranks. “Well, I think there’s at least half a dozen people – the other 18 will probably resent me saying half a dozen – in the present cabinet, and some beyond, who clearly have leadership potential,” he said. Rather than seeing that as a threat, he argued, the leadership should encourage it. “Instead of seeing everything as a challenge, you could see it as an opportunity.” For Blunkett, these questions fed into a wider concern about public trust. “I think there’s quite a serious threat to people having trust and faith in democracy and believing that it can actually deliver,” he said. Politicians, he argued, bore some responsibility, particularly when they promised results “on a time scale, and in a way which is often unrealistic”.
There was also a failure, he said, to explain the purpose of government. Too often, politics was framed as something done to people, from the top down, or as faith that markets alone would deliver. “We don’t talk enough about [an] enabling government,” Blunkett said – one that allowed individuals, businesses, local authorities and communities to thrive.
That challenge was made even more difficult by the changing media landscape. Just 20 years ago, Blunkett noted, around ten million people watched the evening news and most people read a newspaper. Today, he said, that figure had fallen to “minuscule proportions”. People now absorbed information online, often “in an echo chamber”, reinforcing what they already believed. “We don’t have hegemony any more, in the terms that Antonio Gramsci was talking about in the mid-20th century, where people had a feeling of something in common,” he said. “So society is fragmented. How democracy deals with that is the really big challenge, I think, of the years ahead.”
[Further reading: Keir Starmer’s crisis of faith]
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