What Blair told Starmer about disruption and Trump

Former PM’s influence on his successor emerges from his answers to questions from students, writes John Rentoul

- John Rentoul

Keir Starmer needs an “even more powerful No 10 than it was in my day”, Tony Blair told students at King’s College London last week – the day after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement. “When I was prime minister people wanted the system improved,” he said. “We did improve it. Public services got better. Today they want the system changed. That is a fundamental difference, and you’re not going to be able to do that without a really strong No 10.”

Voters are more impatient with politicians today, he said, and argued that new technology is the only way of meeting those demands: “Today you’ve got to have a strong centre, and you’ve got to be driving this application of technology to government and public services from the centre.”

He said: “You’ve got a choice today if you are in politics – you’re either a disruptor or you’re going to get disrupted.” It is a mark of his influence over the current prime minister that this phrase appeared in Starmer’s address to a special political meeting of the cabinet in February.

“Right now you can see with the Doge experiment in the US: that is a disruption – you punch a hole in the wall and see what happens,” Blair said, referring to Elon Musk’s controversial appointment to head the Department of Government Efficiency.

Blair did not seem to think much of it – “Let’s see what happens with it” – but he went on: “If conventional politics wants to get traction today it needs to provide a way of really changing the system, and I think technology is the instrument to do that, but it has to be driven from No 10, an even more powerful [government] than it was in my day. And it was by the end of it quite powerful. A lot of people didn’t like it, but if you don’t drive it from the top it never gets done.”