Burnham navigates first Trump meeting with cautious success at UN

Andy Burnham walked into a basement room at the United Nations on neutral ground, about to sit across from the most powerful man in the world. A few months earlier, he had been running Manchester. Now he was a prime minister, and the person across the table was Donald Trump—a president known for turning diplomatic encounters into unpredictable theater.

Burnham looked nervous as the reporters filed in. He had reason to be. These meetings with Trump, conducted live on camera with no script and no clear endpoint, can veer in any direction. The original plan had been to let journalists in at the very start, but instead the two men had talked privately first. That delay meant when the cameras finally arrived, there was more ground to cover, more to say about what had passed between them.

When I caught Trump's eye and asked whether Burnham was someone he could do business with, the answer came quickly and warm. "I do, I think he's a natural business person," Trump said. "We've had a lot of discussions even before this meeting. We've spoken to each other numerous times on the phone. Yeah, I think so, I think so. He gets it. He understands what he has to do." The compliments kept coming. For a new prime minister sitting next to a president with a reputation for unpredictability, this was the best possible opening.

But the real test lay ahead. A question about immigration—a subject where the two men's governments might diverge—passed without friction. So did the British government's decision, announced by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, to impose sanctions on West Bank settlements, a move that had infuriated Israel. Trump seemed willing to let both slide.

Then came the Chagos Islands. Britain had agreed to cede sovereignty of the archipelago to Mauritius while retaining a military base on Diego Garcia. Trump made no effort to hide his view. "I think that's terrible," he said. He added that he believed Burnham would reconsider the arrangement. Burnham's response was brief: "Yep." That single word carried weight. Later, when I asked the prime minister directly whether the deal would change, he described it as something he had "inherited" and said work would continue "to see where that resolution might lead." The implication was clear: the deal was likely to shift.

What made this meeting different from the ceremonial encounters that followed was its rawness. The windowless basement room, the dingy corridor, the lack of the Oval Office's symbolic weight—all of it stripped away the usual grandeur. Trump controlled the length and tone of the public performance, as he always does, but here the stakes felt more immediate, less cushioned by protocol.

Burnham had navigated the encounter without a major collision. He had established what he called "a good connection" with the president. But the Chagos decision hung in the air, a point of disagreement that seemed certain to resurface. For a prime minister barely months into the job, this was a cautious success—a relationship established, a foundation laid. What came next, though, remained uncertain. Friction with Trump was nearly inevitable for any leader, and Burnham might find himself facing pressure on issues he had not anticipated, or pushing back on matters where the president expected agreement.