Whether Andy Burnham has a cordial relationship with Donald Trump won’t be down to whether he’s criticised him in the past. But being chummy with him probably won’t help Britain much either.
Does Andy Burnham have a Trump problem? Well, kind of. Maybe. But it’s probably not going to be the problem you think.
We all know Donald Trump loved Keir Starmer. To start with, at least. In fact, European leaders were so surprised at how well Trump and Starmer got on in the early days, given their different political leanings, that Starmer was made kind of an unofficial Trump whisperer.
Anyway, Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer are very much not the same person, and Burnham will be starting from scratch. Until this week, all Trump knew about Burnham was that he was mayor of “some English town.”
And after Starmer kinda sorta stood up to him over the Iran war, Trump seems to have soured on the special relationship altogether. I mean, we’re not alone in that – there’s not many of America’s traditional allies that Trump is on particularly good terms at this point. But still, despite the British public really, really hating him – we’re frequently told by Number 10, there are valid national security reasons Andy Burnham should pursue a cordial relationship with Trump. For now, at least.
Now, a lot of people bring up the things Burnham has said about Trump before. As recently as 2021, after the January 6th attempted coup, Burnham said: “Any UK politician who gave Trump the time of day should be ashamed right now.” Before that, he said he’d refuse to meet with him on principle, and accused him of “sharing extremist material online.”
But I don’t think any of that is a problem. Trump is pretty used to people slagging him off in public, and doesn’t really hold grudges like that. If he did, he’d have very quickly run out of people in Washington he could do business with. Keir Starmer should perhaps have worked out slightly sooner that the opposite is also true – having a chummy relationship with Trump didn’t mean the US didn’t slap us with the same tariffs as everyone else.
People say Trump is transactional, and that he’ll make nice with anyone he can do a deal with. That’s not exactly true either. ‘Transactional’ implies both parties get something out of it, and Trump has no interest in giving anything away. Anyway, the bigger problem for Burnham is not Trump himself – it’s the people around him.
For example, someone in the administration is not pleased about Burnham picking Ed Miliband for Foreign Secretary. Now, to be clear, Donald Trump has no idea what an Ed Miliband is. And the President doesn’t actually have much to do with Foreign ministers – he’s in a different orbit. But as Secretary of State, Marco Rubio will have quite a lot to do with Miliband – and it seems like this displeasure with his appointment, anonymously whispered to a right wing newspaper – has probably come from his side of the administration.
This could also pose a problem for Burnham in the unlikely event that Trump leaves office in 2029 like he’s supposed to, and Rubio gets elected to replace him. Which is a lot of ‘what ifs’…but worth bearing in mind.
Burnham has said he wants to “meet Trump where he’s at” – a delightfully meaningless phrase. But people read quite a lot into that and Burnham signalling he’d be “pragmatic” about North Sea drilling – about which Trump has a bee in his bonnet, for various reasons, many of them to do with windmills next to his golf club in Aberdeen.
For now, with Trump not really paying attention to anything west of Turkey, that seems to have been enough to keep him calm. They’ll probably meet for the first time in person in September at the UN General Assembly. But ‘calm’ is the most you can hope for. And if Burnham wants to keep Trump calm going forward, that’s the time for him to flutter his eyelashes at him.