LONDON — When Keir Starmer had his first dinner with Donald Trump, he strained so hard to impress the U.S. president that his host offered the British team a second helping of chicken. Andy Burnham’s face-to-face introduction next Tuesday will look very different. Instead of the two-hour Trump Tower rendezvous that Starmer enjoyed in September 2024, British officials expect their new prime minister to sit down with his U.S. counterpart on relatively neutral ground in the United Nations headquarters at the far edge of Manhattan.
Their meeting is currently penciled in for Tuesday afternoon, sandwiched between Burnham’s 15-minute address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday evening and Trump’s morning speech to the same hall — which given his past form, may drown out other headlines with whatever he says there. POLITICO spoke to a dozen current and former senior U.K. officials, ministers and MPs, many of them granted anonymity to speak frankly, about Burnham’s likely handling of the visit.
Almost all predicted he would opt for a middle road somewhere between Starmer’s initial charm and the more combative approach of Canadian PM Mark Carney: Get in, smile, press the case for Ukraine, and try to leave without a major upset. Downing Street’s overwhelming priority for the New York visit has been to squeeze in an IRL meeting with Trump, with whom Burnham has now spoken to by phone twice, according to a person familiar with the preparations. It will allow the two men to engage but with far lower stakes than a one-to-one visit in Washington or London, just one of a series of leader meetings that blend into the noise of a multilateral summit.
The hope, one U.K. government official said, is to “get the Trump meeting done and dusted in a relatively safe environment.” The shift away from Starmer’s more high-pressure encounters is driven not so much by Burnham’s laid-back style — the new PM said last month he will “say what I feel” to Trump while also trying to “find a connection” — as by a profound change in the balance of risk since 2024. Burnham has less to prove. Starmer, who took office shortly before Trump’s second election victory, signed deals on tech, trade and pharmaceuticals from scratch.
Warming to Trump was the “medicine required at that period,” said a U.K. diplomat. His successor’s job is to fix the mess of unresolved threads left behind. Burnham also has the benefit of hindsight, having watched Starmer’s efforts to praise Trump lead to embarrassment when the president lambasted the PM over the Iran conflict, oil drilling and tech taxes.
Trump at one point even dissed Starmer as “no Winston Churchill.” The new PM won’t “bend the knee in the way Starmer did,” predicted the same U.K. diplomat. He won’t be going to “kiss the ring,” added the first U.K. government official quoted above. There’s no drama about having to stay in his good books.” Yet Trump still has two years left in office, and a smooth relationship will be vital for the U.K. leader who has tried to keep his focus on domestic issues — but is watching his promises to ease living costs be buffeted by rising defense pressures and inflation from the Iran war.
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