Will Trump give Burnham the time of day?

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0:36Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots. I'm Noah Hoffman and today I am delighted to be joined by Tim Shipman and Freddie Gray. Tim, it's a big day for Andy Burnham. It is his first... He's left Manchester. It's his first face-to-face with Donald Trump. What's on the agenda? And also, you have a lot of foreign office expertise and contacts. Can you also take us sort of behind the scenes in terms of how diplomats will be preparing Burnham for this moment as well? The agenda will be getting to know you, a bit of chat about Ukraine, a bit of chat about state of the world, Iran, Straits of Hormuz, all of that.

1:16But Burnham will almost certainly face some Trumpian interventions on why aren't you drilling the North Sea? to which Burnham, if he's being honest, will say, well, we might well do, but we can't do it before the Hobans and Pancras by-election, Mr President. Otherwise, those terrible Greens might get in. Chagos might come up, you know, which Burnham is sort of still keeping simmering and Trump thinks completely deranged. But generally, the two subjects on which Trump is prepared, apropos of nothing to offer advice to British Prime Ministers, is fossil fuels and the need to get them out of the ground and immigration and the need to stop it.

1:50and he will sort of probably proffer something unexpected in those areas. I remember writing lots when Starmer was going off to meet Trump for the first time and they'd taken a lot of advice on how to handle him. They'd been getting briefed by the chap who briefed Shinzo Abe ahead of his first meetings with Donald Trump, who everyone thought was the most accomplished leader at dealing with him in the first term. There was lots of nicey-nicey. David Lammy was getting to know everybody, cosying up to J.D. Vance and all that sort of thing. I don't think much of any of that has happened this time.

2:22I don't think the British ambassador in Washington is quite as proactive a figure as some of his predecessors, Karen Pierce, Peter Maddelson, were very political kind of characters. Christian Turner is a very sort of Foreign Office clone kind of character. so I think you know this could be uncomfortable I mean the good news for the Brits I guess is that the White House press corps appear to be boycotting the pool clip at the top of their meeting so there won't be the sort of audience that Trump normally has to say something provocative and entertaining so that might slightly lessen his the amount of trouble he might cause secondly Trump is seeing President Xi of China later in the week and that is very much more the focus of You know, if the White House is thinking about diplomatic niceties and the sequencing of events and what to talk about, they'll be worrying about that meeting rather than the one with Burnham.

3:15And the sadness here, of course, is often the good anecdotes don't come from the meeting. They come from the lunch. And I don't think there is a lunch this time. Famously, of course, Trump was sort of offering extra potatoes to David Lammy. And this was seen as proof that the special relationship was in rude health. Well, one can only imagine a situation if Trump were to offer more spuds to Burnham and he'd be like, well, I only do chips and gravy, Mr. President. So we'll be avoiding that. And Freddie, from the US perspective, obviously, we've got midterms coming up. Burnham is just one of many world leaders that Trump will be meeting with at the United Nations General Assembly.

3:53And of course, he's got his big speech, which last year was full of colour. What will Trump want to get out of this hunger? Well, I think, I mean, particularly with regards to Britain, I mean, you can't really blame Donald Trump for not having a clear idea who the British Prime Minister is. He's had to see off quite a few. As Tim said, you know, the meeting with Xi is the big thing in America this week. There is this interesting fight going on with the press. Trump has sort of banned various journalists. Washington Press Corps has got into a fit of righteous indignation and is refusing to cover him.

4:27And so there's all sorts of shenanigans going on there. Which is pretty amazing, actually, because normally it's every man for himself over there. You know, the parliamentary lobby here often has a collective hissy fit about things. But the Americans don't tend to do that. I think there's a real genuine... They may actually be annoyed. Genuine exasperation, I think. But I'm getting far away from the question, which is what does Trump want out of this? I think the Houthis is going to be the thing of the day. You know, some sort of joint Western show of strength in support of Saudi Arabia. Trump will try and sort of turn that into the Western tide, you know, turning his way on Iran.

5:03Whether that will be successful is a very difficult question to answer. Yeah, I think as far as Britain's concerned, you know, Burnham's being squeezed in for half an hour before the Japanese prime minister. They're not going to get across a lot. It's probably going to be delayed. They'll probably get like 10 minutes and then there will be a pool session. and Trump may send something ridiculous, but he'll probably do what he always does when he meets British Prime Ministers for the first time, which is say how much he likes them, probably compliment Burnham's accent. Talk about his mum, talk about the Queen, the King.

5:37And then the British officials will get very excited and say, now we're going to set up a meeting in the White House and it's all hunky-dory. And my God, the Brits will be counting the minutes. If he does dispatch him after 10 or 12 minutes, Burnham and his team will go and hide in the loo so it makes it look like it was longer, you know, because we are, the British press corps is always acutely attuned to anything resembling a snub in these situations. I had the great, the most fun foreign trip I've ever been on was the one where Gordon Brown was flying around America. Oh, the walk and talk. Having been told in advance that, you know, he was not going to get a bilateral with Barack Obama, President Obama, as he used to refer to him.

6:17And we had a pre-brief before we got on the plane And a couple of us asked this question and they were very, very evasive about it. It was perfectly clear he was not going to get this. And then on the trip, someone nefarious from within the government approached us all over dinner and explained that Gordon Brown had five times begged for an audience with Barack Obama. And this had not been granted. This was an act of sabotage, kamikaze, revenge from within the infighting in the Labour government, which was most entertaining. And then the following day, I remember being with Andy Grice of The Independent, and we were called over by one of Gordon Brown's spin doctors and said, it's happened, it's happened, they've had a meeting.

6:54Oh, brilliant, well done, you know, you've turned this around, great, where was it? Well, they were walking through the kitchens of a hotel. And I remember walking back into the sort of walk back into the press room that we had in this hotel sort of filing room, close the door and said, you'll never guess what's happened, lads. They think they've saved this. But it turns out it was a sort of murky walk and talk through the bowels of the hotel. We all use the word bowels in our in our copy. And yeah, Brown went absolutely bananas. and there's the key question of what present Andy Burnham is going to give Donald Trump, there's speculation it's going to be something Manchester themed and I've got this nightmare vision that he's going to give him a signed Stone Roses t-shirt and Donald Trump's going to look very confused as to what this means but again, I mean, going back to the presence and things become, for us Brits and particularly the British journalists, they become incredibly important and of course for Americans it doesn't really matter at all They don't care about any of that stuff The present Obama gave back to Brown It was a box set of DVDs.

7:53The West Wing. No, it wasn't. It was like a sort of crappy collection of films. I thought he gave him a signed copy of The West Wing. No, no. Well, he might have done that on a different occasion. But on this occasion, it was a sort of, here's some crappy 1950s movies that you probably haven't watched. And of course, anyone who's lived in America knows that their DVD system is different from ours. And these DVDs didn't even play on a British DVD recorder. And Tim, can you just talk us through the significance of Andy Burnham saying Britain will help Saudi Arabia's war effort against the Houthis?

8:27Not quite in keeping with Burnham's adage that we always back the little guy or the underdog, but nonetheless, what does that mean for the country? What does it mean for his politics and his supporters? Well, look, I mean, it's the kind of thing that might irritate some of the left of the Labour Party, but the Hooties are more clearly a sort of containable threat than some of the others where he's declined to get involved. But really, it's just a continuation of what previous prime ministers were doing. It would have been much more notable if he'd said, no, we're not going to help. You know, Britain has been providing support for airstrikes on the Hooties and trying to keep open that waterway for several months.

9:05and Starmer authorised actual raids. So I don't think in turn, this is not some great departure for Labour. It is merely confirmation that Burnham has seized the threat. You know, I mean, bluntly, if you close off that bit of water, it's not quite as serious as closing off the Straits of Hormuz, but it is, you know, it's significant. I think something like 30 % of the world's oil goes through the Straits of Hormuz and it's about 15 % goes through where the Hooties are busy trying to block the seaway. So it's obviously a significant situation for the Saudis. And, you know, Saudis, a lot of people don't like it, but they are our allies and they're pretty helpful in a range of things we do.

9:43So Burnham has already moved against Israel. I think it would have been pretty astonishing if he'd extended that to Saudi Arabia. That won't be popular on the left of the Labour Party. But I think it would have been even more of a sort of wild statement of we're going to put sort of queasiness ahead of strategic interest if he had done anything other than what he's done. And Freddie, looking ahead to the Republican primaries in early 2028, where does Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance fit into UNGA, if at all? Well, I mean, obviously, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, will be very involved in what's going on, what the State Department is saying on various fronts internationally.

10:20And J.D. Vance has been probably more of a foreign policy vice president than some of his predecessors. So, yes, they both have pitched themselves as figures on the world stage. I think the latest rumours on the next Republican nomination for the presidential election are that Marco Rubio's maybe not going to run in 2028 and that he's thinking more about 2032. Does that mean that he thinks that this administration is going so badly that he's best off getting out of it and aiming further down the line? And then there was recently a midterm convention for the Republican Party in Texas. And J.D. Vance gave this big speech when the crowd and the crowd were shouting at him 28, 28.

11:06So he sort of seemed to confirm his status as the very obvious front runner. And he's been raising a lot of money. And so at the moment, it's looking like it's very much J.D. Vance's nomination to lose. But there's a very, very long way to go. And you can bet there'll be plenty more twists and turns. Well, with that, I think we'll bring the episode to a close and we will have much more on this historic meet between Burnham and Trump throughout the week. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Freddie. And thank you for listening to Coffeehouse Shots.

11:49Ever notice how every new AI tool asks you to explain your business to it all over again? Google Workspace with Gemini skips that. You get Google's AI built right into the premium versions of Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. No new tools, no extra logins. Just one subscription that gives you personalized AI right inside your actual workflow. Make work less work. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini.