During my time serving in the White House, the UK went through four prime ministers, yet it never seemed to unsettle Washington DC. A stable administration always managed to treat those political changes as a process, not a crisis.
That contrast matters now. Britain has a new prime minister, but the real question is what kind of White House will they face? That reality doesn’t look good.
During the Obama and Biden administrations, when I served as a senior official and later as Joe Biden’s White House press secretary, a leadership change in London set off a predictable sequence of preparation. The National Security Council updated briefing materials, the State Department coordinated with the embassy in London and policy teams reviewed the incoming prime minister’s record.
Meanwhile, communications staff prepared guidance for the President’s remarks and senior officials assessed how the new leader might shape Nato, Ukraine, trade, climate cooperation or a number of other priorities of the day.
It was orderly, it was professional, it was grounded in expertise.
During one of those transitions, I told reporters that Biden had already been briefed, and that our national security and diplomatic teams were in contact with their counterparts in London. That was not a scripted line. It was a description of how the system worked. Each time the UK changed prime minister, the White House responded with preparation, coordination and a clear understanding of the stakes.
The institutions beneath the politics were doing their job. That meant that even when London was turbulent, Washington was not.
Now the US and UK are both unstable. Trump’s administration is a far cry from those earlier presidencies, and the Special Relationship that once encompassed so much now often hinges on a single personality: Donald Trump. And his whims.
In the days since Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, I haven’t seen evidence that the normal process is functioning. The first call between Burnham and Trump appeared polite enough, but a single call does not tell you whether the system underneath is working.
What I have seen instead is uncertainty about who inside the White House is actually driving the relationship. In previous administrations, you could see the machinery activate, you could see the preparation, you could see the coordination. None of that has been visible.
Rishi Sunak on his first US visit as prime minister with then-president Joe Biden (Photo: Niall Carson – Pool/Getty Images)The White House the UK faces now is not the one I worked in. It is more centralised and personality-driven. It is less staffed with experts who have spent their careers working on Europe.
I watched non-partisan career staff leave the government in large numbers after I left the White House. These were people who carried institutional memory and long‑standing relationships across regions and across agencies. They were the ones who kept foreign policy steady regardless of who occupied the Oval Office.
Seeing that expertise drain out was alarming. It signalled that the foundation beneath US foreign policy was thinning out, and that the structure I had relied on when I was in the building was becoming more fragile.
The traditional process that once guided foreign policy has been weakened. The experts, the career officials and the quiet diplomacy that once shaped the relationship have been vastly reduced. Policy positions have also shifted without explanation. Senior roles have gone unfilled or given to unqualified political allies of Trump. Allies have struggled to identify who speaks for the administration on key issues.
Nowadays, foreign policy in the US has become reactive rather than structured. Expertise has been replaced by proximity. The question that matters most is not what Burnham believes and wants to try to achieve together. The question is how the new Prime Minister treats Trump.
That is the filter. That is the risk.
If Trump turns against Burnham, all bets are off. I have seen a President face personal tension with a foreign leader and still keep the relationship moving. The relationship moved forward because it had to. That discipline was the guardrail. It is not guaranteed now.
For decades, the UK could rely on the stability of American institutions even when its own politics were unsettled. That is no longer guaranteed. The relationship is no longer insulated from personality – it is shaped by it.
The guardrails that once protected foreign policy from personal whims have been weakened.
During an Oval Office meeting, Donald Trump grew visibly angry with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)Stepping into this environment, Burnham may encounter mixed signals from officials who lack regional expertise. His team may see policy positions shift based on mood rather than strategy, and they might find that the strength of the relationship depends less on institutional preparation and more on personal chemistry with the President.
The approach Trump will take with Burnham will mirror how this White House has engaged with other allied leaders. But it is the opposite of how the Obama and Biden administrations operated. In those administrations, the relationship was institutional rather than personal.
But Trump seems to make everything personal, and only knows one way to operate, with allies and adversaries alike. It’s a dangerous reality.
Britain has lived through plenty of political change since the Brexit referendum. The US is experiencing its own form of change. But the difference is that the UK still has a functioning civil service beneath the politics. America’s foreign policy infrastructure has been reshaped around one man’s preferences.
This is risky. Systems can be rebuilt, but not easily. The longer a system is shaped around one person’s impulses, the harder it becomes to restore institutional norms.
That is the context in which Burnham now steps into the relationship and must quickly learn how to navigate.
I sat in bilateral meetings with presidents and heads of state. I saw prime ministers visit the White House. Some arrived during moments of global tension, others during periods of calm. What mattered was not the mood of the day but the strength of the system beneath it.
The briefings were ready, the process was intact. That’s what made the relationship stable. Burnham will not encounter that system. He will encounter a White House where the process has been replaced by personality, and we should all be deeply worried.
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