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The Prime Minister is not a man best known for his foreign policy. But like his predecessor he may well find that his premiership is defined by events abroad. This afternoon, Andy Burnham has been meeting Volodymyr Zelensky in the now-constitutional ritual between Britain and Ukraine’s political leaders. In Downing Street, there was a military honour guard to greet the Ukrainian President, while inside there was the usual talk about keeping Donald Trump onside. The US President is facing a tricky midterm elections fight and is trying to open up channels with Vladimir Putin to get cheaper fuel into American pumps. Burnham has promised to go ‘further and faster’ in helping with financial and military aid – words that could have been applied to any one of his last four predecessors.
The challenge for Burnham is to avoid the fate of another regional politician who went national before: Neville Chamberlain, a Brummie scion who later went big on the world stage. One of his predecessors sniffed that he saw foreign affairs through ‘the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe’ – and there is an echo of that in Burnham’s sometimes provincial outlook on the world. At Prime Minister’s Questions today, the ex-Mayor fumbled questions about the UAE’s links to Greater Manchester before blundering his answer on the death of the late Ann Widdecombe. It prompted suggestions by Jesse Norman, the cerebral Shadow Leader of the House, that the PM might have jeopardised the trial of Widdecombe’s alleged killer – sub-optimal to say the least.
Unsurprisingly, this being Burnham, there is no press conference for journalists to ask our dear unelected leader about all this. Ukraine, unlike other matters, remains a topic on which the political elite enjoys popular support for its position. Tomorrow, he will likely be reminded of thornier issues when the GDP monthly estimates drop at 7 a.m., with Chancellor John Healey expected to give his response from an IMF summit in Bangkok. The PM has told Ukraine that he will speed up the delivery of lightweight multirole missiles to bring down fast jet-powered Russian drones. But solving the fallout of Iran will take longer. The world might not be where one wins general elections – but it is certainly where they can be lost.
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