When Keir Starmer had his first dinner with Donald Trump, he strained so hard to impress the U.S. president that his host offered the British team a second helping of chicken.
Andy Burnham’s face-to-face introduction next Tuesday will look very different. Instead of the two-hour Trump Tower rendezvous that Starmer enjoyed in September 2024, British officials expect their new prime minister to sit down with his U.S. counterpart on relatively neutral ground in the United Nations headquarters at the far edge of Manhattan.
Their meeting is currently penciled in for Tuesday afternoon, sandwiched between Burnham’s 15-minute address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday evening and Trump’s morning speech to the same hall — which given his past form, may drown out other headlines with whatever he says there.
That may prove convenient for Burnham.
“There will be so much going on that it reduces the intensity and scrutiny,” said Claire Ainsley, a former aide to Starmer who is now at the center-left Progressive Policy Institute think tank.
POLITICO spoke to a dozen current and former senior U.K. officials, ministers and MPs, many of them granted anonymity to speak frankly, about Burnham’s likely handling of the visit. Almost all predicted he would opt for a middle road somewhere between Starmer’s initial charm and the more combative approach of Canadian PM Mark Carney: Get in, smile, press the case for Ukraine, and try to leave without a major upset.
Downing Street’s overwhelming priority for the New York visit has been to squeeze in an IRL meeting with Trump, with whom Burnham has now spoken to by phone twice, according to a person familiar with the preparations. It will allow the two men to engage but with far lower stakes than a one-to-one visit in Washington or London, just one of a series of leader meetings that blend into the noise of a multilateral summit.
The hope, one U.K. government official said, is to “get the Trump meeting done and dusted in a relatively safe environment.”
by Politico – What Andy Burnham needs from Donald Trump at their New York meet
