Andy Burnham may search ‘Love Actually’ second with Trump after Starmer attends final NATO summit
Keir Starmer heads to his last NATO summit as Prime Minister this week. Although if rumours are to be believed, he wouldn’t mind returning as Secretary General in the future.
More troublingly, there’s also every chance it will be the last time Donald Trump attends the organisation’s annual gathering.
The US President has said out loud that he’s only attending this time because his pal Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the President of host country Turkey, basically begged him not to skip it.
And Trump’s perennial gripes about the unfairness of the NATO agreement have returned, and somehow they are even more fiery. He’s still sore about NATO allies failing to leap to his aid during the opening days of his illegal and haphazard attack on Iran.
And that’s led to posts on Truth Social in recent days complaining that in his view the other allies don’t spend enough money on defence. “Ridiculous for the USA to continue along this one sided path when the relationship is not reciprocal,” Trump wrote. “They were not there for us!!!”
For Starmer, the decision to not be there for Donald Trump was one of the most popular things he ever did as Prime Minister. And the outgoing PM had some notes for his presumptive replacement Andy Burnham at the weekend that might not be entirely comforting.
“There’s often this discussion – what’s the right balance between dealing with international affairs and dealing with domestic affairs? They’re one and the same thing,” Starmer warned in a chat with the BBC.
“Whoever’s my successor is going to face the same global conflict. We keep saying, and it’s true, we’re in a more dangerous and volatile world than we’ve been in for probably most of my lifetime. That’s not just a phrase, that’s reality.”
The King in the North may have his attention trained on spending as much time outside of Westminster as possible, but there’s no indication he has the same enthusiasm as Starmer for international relations.
On the potential for a relationship with Trump, something Starmer poured gallons of his political capital into cultivating, Burnham has stayed relatively tight-lipped. He’s been critical of Trump in the past, but not as personally insulting as, say, David Lammy.
If Burnham wants to try and hug Trump close, charming him with those big eyelashes and nonspecific northern accent, he’d do well to keep Lammy around in some fashion. The Deputy PM may have had some intemperate words for the President in the past, but but his weird Catholic bromance with Vice President JD Vance would be a distinct asset.
The smarter move, at home at least, would be to wait and see what Trump does after November’s midterm elections, where he’s either expected to lose control of Congress to the Democrats – or else to attempt to declare the result illegitimate and try to illegally cling on to power.
If Burnham is looking to emulate his buddy Hugh Grant and have a ‘Love Actually’ moment, this would be the time to do it.
