How Will Andy Burnham’s First Months On The World Stage Play Out?
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6 min read
Britain’s next prime minister, Andy Burnham, has put domestic issues at the heart of his agenda – but, as his soon-to-be predecessor Keir Starmer has found, the world stage is always calling.
In his seemingly constant flights from summit to summit, Starmer was branded "never here Keir" by critics who accused him of spending too much time abroad. His allies insisted he was restoring the UK’s standing internationally by forging closer relationships across the globe.
Olivia O’Sullivan, director of the UK in the World Programme at Chatham House, told PoliticsHome that foreign trips have become essential for heads of government in an increasingly unstable world.
“There’s sometimes a bit of an idea that Starmer made foreign policy a priority, because he was away a lot. If you look at it, he didn’t travel loads more than a lot of other prime ministers, and it wasn’t exactly a choice as such,” she said.
“We are just in an era when international issues are really pressing. There are multiple conflicts. [US President Donald] Trump himself is very volatile and tends to favour leader-to-leader encounters and relationships.”
On taking office and after appointing his cabinet on Monday, Burnham is expected to make the traditional series of phone calls to world leaders. This will likely include his first exchange with Trump, who last month told reporters that all he knew of Burnham was that he was the “mayor of a town” and that he is “extremely liberal”.
On his first day alone, Starmer called Trump's predecessor Joe Biden, who was US President at the time, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen, Ireland’s Simon Harris, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Poland’s Donald Tusk and Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Calls with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz were only made on his second day, along with India’s Narendra Modi, Japan’s Fumio Mishida and Australia’s Anthony Albanese.
Starmer went on to meet many of them only a few days later at a Nato summit in Washington DC, but Burnham arrives in Downing Street too late for this year’s summit.
As such, Burnham's first major international conference as PM is likely instead to be at the United Nations General Assembly (Unga) in late September. If he attends as expected, this will mark his first in-person encounter with several of the UK’s most important allies.
“It may be an opportunity to meet Zelenskyy if they haven’t found an opportunity before, and I expect Burnham will want to continue underlining the UK’s support for Ukraine,” O’Sullivan said, adding that it may also be his first meeting with Trump.
“There are some obvious questions around the tariff pacts and investment agreements [with the US] that Starmer was able to secure during his time as Prime Minister.
"Some aspects of those have been suspended or put on ice – it’s difficult to maintain long-term agreements with the Trump administration. So it’s possible Burnham will want to talk about that, but an awful lot is just being eclipsed by the US-Iran conflict.”
A UK-EU summit scheduled for 22 July 2026 was postponed following the news of Starmer’s departure, with a new date yet to be set. PoliticsHome understands that it will take place in the early autumn.
“That will tell us a lot about how the Burnham government wants to take forward that relationship,” O’Sullivan said. “They [the EU] will be really keen to see the UK bring some clarity about where it wants to go…
“Not just [on] individual programmes and initiatives, but: ‘Where are we going together on a joint approach to defence?', 'What do you want from the trade and mobility initiatives that we’ve been discussing for more than a year now?’”
Discussions over how the UK can work more closely with Europe on defence comes after the EU last year established its Security Action for Europe (Safe) loan guarantee scheme.
“We’ve wanted to join it, a lot of European countries have wanted us to join it as well,” said Thomas Nurcombe, research manager at the Coalition for Global Prosperity.
“The barrier has been the level of financial commitment that Britain puts in – with one particular country setting quite a high bar for us to achieve, when other European countries want it to be lower, because they want us to be involved.”
Talks over whether the UK would join Safe collapsed last year after France pushed the EU Commission to demand more than €6bn in entry fees from the UK. The price tag was later slashed to €2bn, but no agreement was reached.
A proposed EU-UK youth mobility deal, which would allow 18- to 30-year-olds to live and work in each other’s countries, will also be up for discussion. The UK’s attempts to cap entrants from the EU at 50,000 per year have been derided as a “non-starter” by EU diplomats and will be a key issue for Burnham to unpick.
The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Antigua and Barbuda will take place from 1 to 4 November. Thankfully for Burnham, the Caribbean nation is rather easier to reach than the last CHOGM summit in Samoa, which required Starmer to take a 27-hour flight via Canada, California and Hawaii, accompanied by journalists.
Later in November, the Cop31 UN Climate Change Conference beckons at Antalya in Turkey. Burnham will face a level of expectation to attend, as British PMs have gone every year since the UK hosted the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in 2021.
“It will be really interesting to see if he goes to Cop,” said O’Sullivan. “I expect he will, and I expect he will continue to make climate a priority, but he might slightly reframe the way in which he does that.
“We know he cares a lot about industrial strategy, regional investment – it may be that he weaves in those themes and priorities around his approach to climate.”
If Burnham does attend Cop, he may have to fly directly to or from the European Political Community summit in Ireland, which takes place right in the middle of Cop on 12 November.
As Christmas nears, Burnham will finally go to Miami for the G20 conference on 14 to 15 December. O’Sullivan said that having Trump as the event’s host may make for a “slimmed-down” and “unusual” meeting, given his administration’s scepticism towards multi-lateral summits.
The conference will set some of the context for 2027’s G20 meeting, which will be hosted by Burnham in the UK.
“It will be interesting to see if there are any themes and approaches from how the US does it that the UK wants to pick up,” O’Sullivan said, “or if the UK chooses to be a bit more focused on getting back on track after a Trump-hosted G20. A lot depends how things unfold in Miami.”
