Andy Burnham's Approach to the US Relationship: A Cooler Path Ahead?

Efforts to preserve a close White House relationship dominated Keir Starmer’s premiership and ultimately helped doom him.

His anticipated successor Andy Burnham’s intentions on the world stage are emerging gradually. The signs so far suggest he will neither rush to love-bomb Trump nor seek to antagonize him, taking a cooler approach than Starmer.

The first obvious opportunity for Burnham to visit Washington will be the U.N. General Assembly in September, but he may opt to skip it in line with his apparent wish to dial down foreign travel — particularly as it will come right before Labour Party conference, a major moment for the newly minted MP for Makerfield.

“I think there’s a recognition he and his team will focus on domestic politics first,” said one U.S. official, granted anonymity like others in this piece to speak candidly. “It doesn’t feel like a ‘I must jet across to D.C. immediately’ tactic is imminent.”

Senior observers — including Starmer himself — have warned that Burnham’s purported wish to focus on his domestic agenda above all else is not sustainable. “My own reflection is that you can’t divorce the international from the domestic,” Starmer said Wednesday, speaking from the NATO summit.

Burnham sought to address this head-on in an op-ed in The Times Wednesday, linking the two and pledging: “Our relationship with the U.S. will remain critical as our most important defence and security ally.” He did not expand much beyond that on the alliance with Washington, but said he wants “an even closer” relationship with Europe.

This will add to the sense that Burnham will seek a level of continuity, particularly on security matters, while seeking to emphasize alternative trade relationships and a more strident approach to asserting Britain’s self-interest to appeal to his MPs.

“Burnham can afford to find areas of strategic alignment, like leaning into the pro-business half of his pro-business socialism, and avoid picking fights he doesn’t need,” Michael Martins, a former U.S. embassy official and founding partner at Overton Advisory. “There will be time enough to set out his stall for the left wing of the Labour Party.”

Steady as she goes

One of the only known pieces of the diplomatic jigsaw so far is that Burnham intends to keep Jonathan Powell as national security adviser, a choice that has been widely greeted as signaling continuity in Downing Street’s relationship with the White House and the U.K.’s commitments on peace efforts in Ukraine and Iran.

Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Powell had worked “very, very closely” with U.S. counterparts and “the fact that he has agreed to stay on has taken off some of the most immediate pressure.”

It’s less clear who he plans to put in the key role of foreign secretary. Burnham has considered inviting David Miliband, who served as foreign secretary under Gordon Brown, back to take the job of top diplomat, but faces pressure not to remove Yvette Cooper, one of Labour’s most senior female Cabinet ministers. Ditching Cooper would generate more churn at the Foreign Office — she has been in post for less than a year and the chief civil servant was also recently sacked.

An ally of Cooper said the U.K. needed to resist “treating the job as a trading card.” However, other British officials were philosophical about the dilemma, pointing out that either of them would be a safe pair of hands as far as international diplomacy is concerned since Miliband has extensive experience as a statesman.

Also unknown is the future of U.K. envoy to the U.S. Varun Chandra, who has played a central role in trade negotiations under Starmer, including the Tech Prosperity Deal with the U.S. that coincided with announcements of billions dollars of inward investment into the U.K. by tech giants.

While those investments have largely continued, the bilateral deal was paused by the Trump administration only a few months later due to what it claimed was a failure by the U.K. to address non-tariff barriers to trade. Attempts to revive the deal by the U.K. have so far come up short.

A senior U.K. government official said “a handful of key relationships have been keeping us alive — Varun with business and Powell in the security world. Beyond that there are very very few channels of communication, and it worries me.”

The same official said they believed Chandra was in contact with members of Burnham’s team and that the envoy could be persuaded to stay if the future PM saw his role as a valuable one.

Burnham and his advisers have also spoken to former No. 10 foreign policy adviser John Bew as they consider their next steps, though not with a formal role in mind, according to two people familiar with discussions.

A long-distance relationship

Burnham appears unlikely to zoom headlong into a Washington charm offensive after entering office, as Starmer did with his invitation for an unprecedented second state visit by the U.S. president last year and a return trip by King Charles earlier this year connected to the 250th anniversary of American independence.

The U.S. official said that “despite the enduring closeness of the relationship, there are just fundamental policy differences,” pointing to the U.K.’s move to limit drilling in the North Sea and difficulties in accelerating defense spending.

There is a looming question over the future of the Chagos Islands, where Trump has clashed with the Starmer administration in the past.

Burnham is also being urged to expend more effort on non-U.S. trading partnerships. Jim O’Neill, a senior economist with close ties to Burnham, told POLITICO that after two years of dealing with an erratic U.S. administration the U.K. should cast its net more widely and “should be open to increasing its trade with countries like China.”

Leonard said Burnham could do “more to work out how you hedge against what the White House is doing by building up the relationship with European countries.”

There is the possibility of open hostilities, too. The U.S. official said certain Cabinet appointments — particularly Ed Miliband as chancellor — had the potential to trigger Trump and the fallout could not be contained by the retention of “steady hands” such as Powell and Chandra.

Martins said Burnham would face “temptation to fight domestic political battles on the international stage” on North Sea energy or the digital services tax “that may play well with Labour Party members and Green-Labour swing voters, but will generate real friction with the president.”

Domestic pressure

For now, the next British PM remains pretty far down Trump’s agenda, with his name drawing blank looks for the most part in Washington.

But Burnham has already demonstrated a willingness to stray into sensitive territory, warning at his Makerfield victory speech of a risk that “the politics of our country go[es] down a path towards greater darkness and division and ending up somewhere like the U.S., where people don’t talk to each other in the street if they vote different ways.”

Some Labour MPs would like to see Burnham lean further into this confrontation, particularly with Trump entering the second half of his presidency after the midterms, but Whitehall insiders have advised him this would be a mistake.