When Keir Starmer held his first dinner with Donald Trump, he tried so hard to make a good impression that the U.S. president offered the British team a second helping of chicken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Andy Burnham\u2019s first face-to-face meeting next Tuesday is expected to feel very different. Instead of the two-hour private dinner at Trump Tower that Starmer enjoyed in September 2024, British officials anticipate that the new prime minister will meet his American counterpart on more neutral ground at the United Nations headquarters on the edge of Manhattan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The encounter is currently scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, slotted between Burnham\u2019s 15-minute speech to the UN General Assembly that evening and Trump\u2019s morning address to the same chamber \u2014 an address that, given Trump\u2019s track record, could easily dominate the day\u2019s headlines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That timing may work in Burnham\u2019s favour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere will be so much happening that it will reduce the intensity and the level of scrutiny,\u201d said Claire Ainsley, a former adviser to Starmer who now works at the centre-left Progressive Policy Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A dozen current and former senior British officials, ministers and MPs \u2014 many of them speaking on condition of anonymity \u2014 discussed how Burnham is likely to handle the meeting. Almost all expected him to choose a middle path between Starmer\u2019s early charm offensive and the more confrontational style of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney: arrive, smile, make the case for Ukraine, and leave without a major incident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Downing Street\u2019s top priority for the New York trip has been to secure an in-person meeting with Trump, with whom Burnham has already spoken twice by phone, according to a person familiar with the preparations. The UN setting will allow the two leaders to meet while keeping the stakes far lower than a full bilateral visit in Washington or London, as just one of many leader-to-leader encounters that tend to blend into the general noise of a multilateral summit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The hope, one UK government official said, is simply to \u201cget the Trump meeting done and dusted in a relatively safe environment.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Keir Starmer held his first dinner with Donald Trump, he tried so hard to make a good impression that the U.S. president offered the British team a second helping of chicken. Andy Burnham\u2019s first face-to-face meeting next Tuesday is expected to feel very different. Instead of the two-hour private dinner at Trump Tower that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36388,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36386\/revisions\/36388"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}