Keir Starmer should ‘get a grip’ in subsequent three months or he’s completed, Lord Blunkett says as Prime Minister’s Cabinet is beset by management infighting and Budget chaos
Former Labour Home Secretary Lord David Blunkett has warned Sir Keir Starmer that he needs ‘to get a grip’ within three months or could face serious consequences.
And the Labour Party grandee urged the Prime Minister to improve the team around him and bring in someone more politically experienced to take control, moving Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney aside.
After a tumultuous week in Parliament with confusion over a potential Wes Streeting-led leadership challenge and chaos over the forthcoming Budget, he issued his stark warning to Starmer:
‘If you don’t display in the next three months that you have got a grip, that you understand how people feel and that you are reacting to the things that matter to them and that you are managing and you are competent then of course people will react – that’s a democracy!’
And he forecast: ‘If that doesn’t happen in three months then something quite serious will erupt, I think, from both the parliamentary party and beyond.
‘In the past people have said ‘Who is in the public eye? Who is getting the attention and sometimes they have said that if that isn’t the person it should be – and it should be Keir Starmer and his cabinet – then they have to go’.
And Lord Blunkett, one of the most senior figures in Tony Blair’s government, said the Prime Minister needed someone more experienced to run his operation like Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell, who understood how the outside world viewed what was going on, adding:
‘For goodness sake, get a grip. This can’t carry on. It has implications obviously much wider than just the popularity of this government at this moment in time.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer arriving to the Western Balkans Summit at Lancaster House on October 22, 2025
Lord David Blunkett with a bronze bust of himself at the House of Lords on October 14, 2025
‘If people in Downing Street – and I mean the Prime Minister as well as those around him -don’t understand how people see this then they are living in a different paradigm.
‘My advice is for god’s sake trust your cabinet – let them get on with the job and don’t have people second guessing their politics unless they are better politicians than the ones you have appointed to cabinet.’
Lord Blunkett told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that although ‘apparent paranoia’ about leadership challenges was ‘nothing new’ citing former Labour Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and later Gordon Brown as well as Tory Prime Minister John Major – he ‘could not remember Downing Street ever actually triggering something like they did earlier this week’.
He said: ‘That is highly unusual and I don’t know who has given assurances to Keir that they didn’t do it but it is quite clear that it was done by someone very close to him so you need someone in charge who is not only trusted by Keir Starmer – and Morgan McSweeney is – but you need someone with substantial experience of actually managing a group of people, being highly political in terms of antennae and being sensitive to how it will be seen outside.’
The former long-serving MP for Sheffield Brightside said: ‘I think some people need to get out a bit to put it mildly. I do think we need someone who is an overarching organiser of the whole operation and to use other people’s skills which they have in the most appropriate way.’
Lord Blunkett said he was not suggesting that McSweeney should ‘simply be ousted’ but that he could be found something else that ‘he was really good at’ with someone with ‘the kind of skills’ Jonathan Powell has- ‘and is incidentally displaying on the international front’ brought in.
The former Minister said he had personally been grounded by his family and friends when he had faced briefings against him and it was important to have ‘really good people around you who say ‘stop it’’ or you would lose ‘your whole raison d’etre and what you are trying to achieve and the delivery and the whole purpose of you being there gets diverted’.
