David Blunkett
speaker
119 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
David Blunkett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, of course.
There's no point in me saying no, because I've tried to lead the Labour Party in the past, and therefore I've tried to want to be Prime Minister in the past.
No, although what I've changed my mind upon is the way in which power needs to be distributed around...
this country you know it doesn't work i mean i think we've seen it again the model of government doesn't work that the kind of overall structure of a top-down we'll decide in whitehall and we'll just throw stuff out at you all it doesn't work it's it never did and it definitely doesn't work now um back then i was the guardians north of england editor and burnham was three years into his stint as the mayor of greater manchester
But my interests were entirely unruly.
I hadn't met Andy because my very long-standing friend, sadly deceased, Tessa Jowell, employed Andy as a researcher.
And I realised when Andy came into Parliament in 2001 that he was going to go places.
And one of the starting points was to be a parliamentary private secretary.
And the job of the PPS is to watch your back.
It's to be there in the Commons, picking up when people are unhappy, when there's going to be a rebellion against PPS.
particular policy, feedback when things are going well, alerting you and being your voice as well, standing up for you and making sure that people get the messages.
So it's a real foundation, a grounding in parliamentary politics.
He has a sense of humour, which is always very helpful.
He could do the glad-handing very well indeed because he's very comfortable, as they say, in his own skin and easy to get on with.
So that made it very easy.
He used to come to our team meetings and we were dealing with some of the really big issues at the time.
There'd been...
The attack on the World Trade Center and beyond, that led to enormous emphasis on security and intelligence.
And of course, as the Secretary of State for the Home Office, I was in charge of MI5.
So there was a lot of learning to be done by all of us.
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