Britain-focused Andy Burnham starts racking up the air miles

NEW YORK — Even senior Whitehall officials believed Andy Burnham would not attend the U.N. General Assembly until the announcement came from the British prime minister’s own mouth.

Unlike his predecessor Keir Starmer, whose globetrotting earned him the nickname “never here Keir,” Britain’s new leader cast himself as a folksy man of the people, focused on domestic issues such as the cost of living and moving centers of state power outside London.

Two months in, Burnham is finding no premier can ignore the pull of diplomacy. He landed in New York late Monday night for a whirlwind schedule of meetings with world leaders, including his first face-to-face with U.S. President Donald Trump. His wife, the marketing executive Marie-France van Heel, will meet leaders’ spouses as part of a formal program.

Burnham traveled to Ukraine to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last month. He has since met leaders including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Mark Carney and plans to attend November’s COP31 climate summit in Turkey.

A decision looms over whether to attend two other major summits — the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda, attended by his foreign secretary and King Charles III, and the G20 summit in December at the Trump National Doral Miami resort.

Burnham will host G20 leaders next year in Manchester, the city where he spent nine years as mayor, at a cavernous former railway station turned conference center that previously hosted the Manchester bands Oasis and The Smiths.

Throughout his march to Downing Street, senior officials in the Whitehall machine quietly said they never doubted that Burnham would be dragged back to international affairs. 

The question is how he explains this to a domestic audience.

Pinning it back to the domestic

So far, Burnham’s Downing Street is taking a similar tack to Starmer’s, especially in his last months: frame every foreign intervention through the lens of reducing the cost of living back home. 

The intended message is not subtle. The prime minister’s official spokesperson said Burnham would use the meeting with Trump “to advance U.K. interests,” adding: “The British people at home are at the forefront of the Prime Minister’s mission in New York this week, because to deliver at home, we must ensure we’re leading international efforts to brighten a darkening global picture.” 

Instead of jettisoning international summits, Burnham is largely attending them like Starmer did — albeit briefly (he will barely spend 24 hours in New York).

One difference is that rather than going abroad for bilateral meetings, Burnham is inviting foreign leaders for mini-breaks in the various corners of the U.K.

He attended an Everton football match with Carney in Liverpool, invited Ireland’s leader Micheál Martin to his “No. 10 North” in Manchester, took French President Emmanuel Macron to see an exhibition of the Bayeux Tapestry, welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the naval city of Portsmouth and met NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in Oxford.

These inward visits mean Burnham can stick to “speed-dating” at multilateral summits, which take up less time and consume less political energy, explained one person with knowledge of the planning who was granted anonymity to speak frankly.

Yet he is still riding both horses — trying to take the lead on global affairs while facing a domestic audience.

No. 10 said ahead of the visit that Burnham is “determined that the U.K. will play a leading role” in tackling issues confronting the world. He has already taken a more muscular approach than Starmer to Israeli settlements on the West Bank, announcing sanctions alongside France, Canada and other countries earlier this month. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said at the time that “settler terrorists” were perpetrating “ethnic cleansing.”

Burnham will also spend Tuesday pushing for closer international co-operation on AI development to manage the technology’s risks. No. 10 said AI would form a “major part” of his visit and speech to UNGA and he would “raise it across the board” in meetings in New York. It was an unexpected pivot from a leader who has devoted little time to talking about the technology.

This will be a particular challenge when meeting Trump, who has described fears about AI’s safety as a “hoax” and said the only “guardrails” needed for AI would be a “strong and smart” president.

Burnham’s spokesperson said ahead of the visit: “The prime minister is determined that the U.K. will play a leadership role in a number of different areas. The U.K. is of course a G7 nation, and you would expect us to play a leadership role across a number of different challenges facing the world at the moment.”

Others around the ruling Labour Party still aren’t sure what that will look like.

Downing Street was straining ahead of the visit to avoid portraying Britain as a “middle power” standing up to the U.S., as Carney has encouraged fellow nations to do. The U.K. has too deep-rooted a security relationship with the U.S. to turn away from it in a meaningful way.

But unlike Carney, Burnham has arguably not set out a detailed vision of where he sees Britain’s place in the world — other than continuing the U.K.-U.S. special relationship, moving closer to the EU and individual interventions like on Israel.

“They’ve not done their intellectual thinking about what the alternative is,” complained one trade union general secretary recently. That person pointed to the U.K.’s approach to China, which remains in a zone of re-engagement that Starmer established on a visit to Beijing in January, and what it will mean for trade and industry. “They’ve not done any thinking on this stuff,” the person added.

In New York, Burnham will seek to prove he has given it all proper thought. He’ll just have to persuade voters he hasn’t dwelt on it for too long.