Andy Burnham has had a lucky escape. The new UK Prime Minister believed he was exchanging messages with Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff – only for it to turn out he was communicating with an imposter.
No 10 officials initially contacted the White House directly, afraid Wiles had been targeted by hackers, but otherwise Burnham largely avoided what would have become a serious political headache.
What could have been a diplomatic disaster has turned out to be…fine, not least because Donald Trump himself has shrugged off the incident as a harmless accident, saying it came down to “a miscommunication”. “I spoke to him,” Trump told reporters of Burnham. “We had a good conversation. A couple of them.”
The trouble for Burnham, though, is that sooner or later a confrontation with the real occupants of the White House is coming, and the issues involved in dealing with actual White House personnel might not prove nearly so easy to resolve, even for a prime minister determined to spend more time at home working on domestic issues, and less on the world stage.
The issue with that ambition is that the world has a way of intruding even on domestic issues. Jamieson Greer, the US Trade Representative, has doubled down on threats by Trump to scrap any US-UK trade deal and impose tariffs of 100 per cent on UK exports should the UK impose a digital services tax, levying 2 per cent of UK revenues from search engines, social media, and large online commercial platforms – almost all of which are US-owned.
This is a policy Burnham inherited from the last Conservative government, but not a policy that would be easy to drop. Cutting taxes for Google, Amazon and X would not be popular with the British public, especially when public finances are tight.
More than that, Burnham has made it clear he would like to take further action against Big Tech overreach. He supported a ban on teens using social media even before Keir Starmer said he would introduce such a policy, and has spoken more broadly about the risks of online harms.
That sets Burnham up for further clashes with the White House, which has repeatedly framed European efforts to regulate Big Tech as a “censorship industrial complex”, and threatened retaliation against any countries which take steps to introduce these kinds of policies.
Greer told The Times that Trump’s threats against the UK over Big Tech were “not a bluff” and that the White House would not allow US companies to be used as “piggy banks” by the UK. Levies such as the digital services tax can reduce the amount of tax tech companies pay in their US domicile by reducing their taxable profits.
Big Tech is just one of several potential points of contention between the US and UK that could flare up in the near future. The US President is still publicly furious with nations that, in his view, failed to support his conflict against Iran. On Monday, Trump said he had ordered that a major joint military exercise with South Korea would be significantly scaled back, partly because of his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong-un.
But in his Truth Social post announcing this, Trump added: “While somewhat unrelated (? ), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!'”
Trump has also threatened to “bomb the shit out of” Oman, a long-standing US regional ally, over disagreements in the handling of the Strait of Hormuz. The UK has similarly refused to join the US conflict against Iran, declined to send ships to open up the strait, and has partially restricted the use of UK bases by the US to launch strikes against Iran.
These issues repeatedly flared up during Starmer’s premiership, and will inevitably do so again – and this time it is Burnham who will have to handle them. His trump card, so to speak, may be North Sea oil.
Burnham has repeatedly signalled that he is likely to approve new drilling in the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil fields, something which would cause blowback among some of his core voters, but would likely be warmly welcomed by Trump, who repeated his calls for the UK to drill the North Sea on Monday.
The effects of such a move might be limited, though, as Trump appears to expect Burnham to curtail the use of wind farms – a personal peeve of the President’s, who particularly dislikes being able to see offshore wind turbines from his Scottish golf course.
Donald Trump is a volatile man at the best of times, and it is never clear from day to day what issues will set him off. Despite that, what is certain is that something will do exactly that – propelling whichever issue incites the flare-up to the top of the news agenda. Andy Burnham might want to keep his focus on the UK – but Donald Trump will not be pushed to the sidelines for long.
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