Donald Trump, who has said he knows little about Andy Burnham except that he is “very liberal”, is about to become the prime minister’s most unwelcome pen pal. The task of steering Britain through the final years of the Trumpian age falls to a leader who “prefers to talk about devolution than diplomacy” — and whose three predecessors found that unwanted hand-holding, obsequious flattery and the royal touch all failed to win over the president.
Nigel Farage, who met JD Vance in Washington over the 4 July weekend, remains a rival channel to the White House. Meanwhile, Burnham must reconcile MPs contemptuous of Trump with a diplomatic and military establishment keen to secure the relationship, and US officials who snipe each time British domestic policy drifts leftwards.
“Trump knows little about Burnham except 'very liberal'; Burnham faces diplomatic crisis with US while Home Secretary Mahmood embodies a different brand of English patriotism.”
Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary Burnham kept in her Cabinet, is a different breed: tough on immigration, rooted in Birmingham’s “place” and motivated by “profound faith”. Lord Glasman calls her the second coming of Elizabeth I. Unmarried and singularly devoted to country, she is “plus anglais que les anglais”. Her parents, immigrants from rural Kashmir, were “not steeped in Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and the Bill of Rights”, she said on becoming Lord Chancellor in 2024. But “they did have a strong sense, arriving here in the UK from rural Kashmir, that this country was different: that there are rules, some written and some not, that we abide by”.
Mahmood passes the Tebbit test: she supports England over Pakistan in cricket “all the way”. Her national identity, made of “stronger stuff than Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘cutting the half-time orange’”, is a robust civic nationalism that she sums up as “a patriotism that speaks, but does not feel the need to shout”. Her hero is Margaret Thatcher — a woman barrister who governed the UK while Mahmood was a child in Taif, Saudi Arabia, where women were banned from practising law until 2013.
British diplomats and senior Labour figures think Burnham will inevitably spend more time on the phone to Washington in the middle of the night than he likes. Some hope covert relationships between intelligence services, military chiefs and diplomats will ease tensions — but that is “complacent” given how American politics has changed. “America First is not just a slogan concocted in a PR firm’s boardroom, but an ideology that is now firmly held by people with real power.” As Dean Acheson knew in 1950, when he burned official documents containing the words “special relationship”, warm relations between the two nations are the exception, not the rule.