Why Andy Burnham has been talking about Russia this week | News Politics

Remember Rishi Sunak’s first meeting with Joe Biden, at the White House in June 2023?  

Of course you don’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if even Rishi Sunak doesn’t remember his first meeting with Joe Biden.

If he does, it might be because he was mistakenly addressed by Biden as Mr President, a few months after the president told a roomful of people celebrating Diwali that ‘Rashee Sanook’ had just become the British PM.   But the meeting itself? Dust in the wind.  

After all, it wasn’t always the case that such a weight of anticipation and fear hung over occasions like this. There wasn’t always a risk the president might launch into a rambling, caustic rant that derails the whole thing.

But in hindsight, I’m not sure the concerns ahead of Andy Burnham’s first in-person meeting with Donald Trump yesterday were justified.

With two high-profile exceptions – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2025 and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa three months later – Donald Trump rarely flips out at a fellow world leader while they’re in the room.

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Even people like Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, who ended up in their jobs partly because of their anti-Trump rhetoric, were treated with varying levels of respect.

So, it’s not a shock that the press conference with Burnham and Trump ended up being pretty civil – even if a few remarks generated their own news stories.

Acknowledging that means we can focus on the stuff beyond the superficial. Stuff like the speech Burnham gave at the UN shortly after the meeting, which provides some interesting insights into how Burnham tackles leading the country.

To show why, I’m going to compare him to another former PM, the last one to address the UN General Assembly: Sir Keir Starmer.

Two years ago, Starmer told the gathered dignitaries that he feared a ‘sense of fatalism has taken hold’ with chat about ‘an age of polarisation, impunity, instability’.

He said: ‘Our task is to say no. We won’t accept this slide into greater and greater conflict, instability and injustice. Instead, we will do all we can to change it.’

You could fairly describe the speech as ‘very Starmer’. It was a call for global cooperation for peace, centred on the application of international law.

One word he didn’t use was ‘Russia’. Burnham mentioned it ten times.

In contrast to Starmer, the new PM took a far more pugilistic tone, especially with the Kremlin. He told the diplomats that the UK ‘will be relentless in building up our hard power and deterrence’, adding: ‘True resilience depends on this military strength.’

It was a speech that seemed to demonstrate how the ‘slide into greater and greater conflict, instability and injustice’ that Starmer refused to accept is happening regardless.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned Russia is preparing ‘hybrid strikes’ against Nato countries that support Ukraine, while the Lithuanian PM Mindaugas Sinkevičius spoke about his country’s evacuation plans yesterday.

It’s at times like this that you feel like lying back, closing your eyes, and remembering that time Joe Biden called Rishi Sunak ‘Mr President’.

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