What “common ground” could Andy Burnham possibly have with Donald Trump? As well as the two men having markedly different politics, the US President is currently in one of his more erratic phases.
At home, he’s in a fight with the media, with even pro-Trump Fox News taking a stand against his ban on a number of other media outlets from the White House. He also – quite randomly – called for a united Ireland while visiting the country last week. He was helpfully fronting those comments that he’d “love to see it unified” by saying he didn’t want to “cause any problems” – the geopolitical version of a teenager saying “no offence, but”.
So Burnham might be forgiven for thinking that his only task in his first meeting with Trump is to make sure that the two get on, that Trump is flattered sufficiently to overlook those political differences, and to get the hell out of there without looking too much like a lapdog. Ahead of the meeting, he said: “We’ve found a connection. So, I will go with where I feel it’s right, to meet him where he is at, and search for that common ground, which I’m sure we’ll find.”
They do have common ground in the way they do politics, though. Both men speak much more from the heart than other politicians in their worlds. The line that the new Prime Minister uses about “giving people hope in their hearts” isn’t a million miles away from “make America great again!”.
Both of them know that they have to tell the public that they’re the ones to make things better, which is the opposite of the approach that Keir Starmer took when he was warning anyone who would listen of how hard things would still be for a long time under his premiership. Burnham is using the Trump playbook, both in clear messaging and also in big promises.
But it is on foreign policy where Burnham could learn the most from Trump. The US President has had a clarifying, electrifying effect on this area, unlike the Democrats before him, who largely felt it was acceptable to wish that everyone else would calm down and that problems would go away of their own accord. Trump has created many problems himself, granted, but he has also used his bluntness to good effect: no one else among Israel’s allies, for instance, would have had the self belief to slap down Benjamin Netanyahu or tell him he was “not thrilled” with the attacks on Hamas leaders in Qatar last year, for instance.
Burnham’s team have wanted him to project a similar level of confidence in his meetings with Trump. When he announced the trade ban on goods made in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the Prime Minister insisted that the “UK has to stand for something”, and has a slightly romantic, Love Actually view of how diplomacy should work.
Earlier this year, he said that “obviously the relationship is important to the UK, but not to the point where we just go along with anything they say”, adding: “We’ve got in trouble in the past when that happens.” It was notable that while Trump has not explicitly criticised Israel’s E1 development in the West Bank, his administration has also been pretty muted in its response to the British sanctions, suggesting both that Burnham’s team have already managed to build a good connection with the US President, and that he might actually see this approach to the Israeli action as being something he’s happy with.
He might even respect a British prime minister who comes to him, pays due respects and flattery and then bluntly but politely says he disagrees with him on a key issue. After all, anything Burnham says will still come across as pretty charming compared to the stand-off Trump is in with Canada’s Mark Carney.
The difference, though, between Burnham and Trump is that ultimately Britain’s opinion on settlement building or indeed many other huge foreign policy questions matters very little in comparison to the position the US takes. So while what Trump says carries weight globally, what Burnham does is much more about his domestic audience – hence his own urgency to announce those sanctions on Israel. He can copy Trump by simplifying narratives, picking good guys and bad guys, and producing addictive TikTok videos. He can make Britain feel great about itself again, so long as no one looks too closely at whether anything is actually changing either at home or abroad.
Trump is at a much more advanced age, both as a man and in terms of his political tenure – and then there are his starkly erratic moments. Plus his weakness on the question of whether he is making things better for Americans is now profoundly affecting both him and the Republicans. But for Burnham, there’s a while before that, and he can learn from the master.
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