The building was given to Robert Walpole, widely regarded as the UK’s first prime minister, by King George III in 1732.<\/p>\n
Lord Walker, the boss of supermarket Iceland and a former adviser to Sir Keir, told the Financial Times on Friday that Number 10 was no longer “fit for purpose”.<\/p>\n
He said: “I think we should turn it into residences, or a museum. It’s a national treasure. It’s amazing. But it’s ridiculous.<\/p>\n
“It’s just a Stuart-era building, not fit for purpose. It has tiny, tiny meeting rooms, all on different levels. There are hazards.”<\/p>\n
Lyons, who led Sir Keir’s communications operation from October 2024 to September 2025, posted on LinkedIn that “Lord Walker is 100% right”.<\/p>\n
He added that staff were “deeply envious” of other departments and described Number 10 as a “gloomy, mice-infested, bomb-curtained rabbit warren”.<\/p>\n
Lyons added: “Moving out was something that was discussed when I was in 10 Downing Street.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The building was given to Robert Walpole, widely regarded as the UK’s first prime minister, by King George…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-814769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}