Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is a global production. What does Burnham do about North Sea oil and gas? Trump is obsessed with this, he's obsessed with it, and it's weird that he's so obsessed with it.
Trump was in a foul mood last night, so I think eyelashes Andy actually got off pretty lightly.
Chapter 2: How does Trump view Andy Burnham's political stance?
My hunch is that Trump will probably quite like the sheer gaseo, the audacity of what Burnham has done, the guts of what he's done.
If he wants to differentiate himself straight up from Starmer, it would be a bigger signal to not run out there than to run out there.
What is a UK foreign policy stance and disposition in the era of Burnham? We don't know yet. I suspect he might not know yet either.
I don't know anything. I see that he was, I guess, the mayor of a town. I hear he's extremely liberal. Extremely. So that means he probably won't open up the Nazi. You know, I gave Keir Starmer some pretty good advice. I said, open up the North Sea.
I told this guy 15 times, and he wouldn't do it. I said, you're going to lose your prime ministership And he did. In fact, I called it about three days earlier.
That is Donald Trump on that small town somewhere in the north of England from where Andy Burnham was the mayor. And also on Keir Starmer and how he, Donald Trump, could have saved his premiership if only he'd been listened to.
How will Donald Trump play Andy Burnham? And more importantly... How will Burnham respond to Donald Trump? Welcome to the News Agents.
The News Agents.
It's John. It's Maylis. It's Lewis. And Donald Trump can never resist offering an opinion. Whether he is well informed on what he's opining about or not is always an open question.
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Chapter 3: What strategies should Burnham adopt regarding his relationship with Trump?
And that Trump will really like that. And the second thing I think that's going to be really important, which has been worked out at the moment with Downing Street, is what happens with the defence investment plan and how Burnham, that is, approaches defence spending. Because if he does up it significantly again, that's something that will curry some favour with the Trump administration.
Yeah. And I think, I mean, for context, Trump was in a foul mood last night. So I think eyelashes Andy actually got off pretty lightly with the sort of mayor of somewhere.
Are we saying eyelashes Andy now?
Eyelashes Andy. To put this in context, Trump had just come away from refusing to sign a bipartisan bill that would have allowed for much more affordable housing at a time when cost of living is very much top of the agenda for US voters. And he was really cross because his own side said,
hadn't pushed through at that point his kind of war bill, which would have given him another $90 billion to spend on sort of Iran and the processes around that. So much of his ire was levelled at his own side, his own senators, Republican senators. And why I think this is relevant is because, I mean, you mentioned Mamdani.
Trump was also furious with the success of Mamdani's candidates in New York overnight on Tuesday night. The relevance of this is that he is now starting to think about the midterms. The midterms could be really bloody for Trump. It could be, frankly, the moment that he loses the House. He doesn't have full control of Congress. So if you think about the timing on that, if Andy Burnham...
starts as PM, sort of proper feet hitting the ground, a new term in September. Two months later, there is a midterm election, which is actually not very good for Trump. It is a very different context to the one in which Keir Starmer started. You know, back in January of 2025, he was rushing through the Mandelson appointment. He wanted to get the trade deal done.
He wanted to be this guy's best friend. If Andy Burnham comes into power at a time when the Trump star is waning, when at least one of those houses is not under Republican control, I think he can afford to be a little bit more circumspect about the speed at which he rushes towards the American president. And that might actually give him some really useful breathing space.
I don't deny that I think he will try and get some early wins. I think it's a really good call that the North Sea oil, which he's already talked about, might just be an easy way of sort of, you know, paving a smooth path when he is at the White House. But I can't see him needing to be sort of straight over to Washington to kind of make his mark. Because what do we know about Burnham?
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Chapter 4: Why has the political landscape shifted so quickly after Starmer's resignation?
That's often the case with incoming prime ministers. But he's going to have to articulate. I think he will be more domestically focused than Starmer. I think his choice of foreign secretary will be a very important one because I suspect he will want to be as more than Starmer was at home or sometimes he'll get dragged into things inevitably. But I think that...
He is going to have to articulate that if he does adopt that less cordial, slightly more bellicose stance with the Americans compared to Starmer, what does our foreign policy look like? Because it was our closeness to the American president and to be a sort of American president whisperer in Europe that gave us more power.
And if it's not going to be that and he knows we're not going to engage much further than Starmer has done with regards to the EU, what is a UK foreign policy stance and disposition in the era of Burnham? We don't know yet. I suspect he might not know yet either.
I'm almost more intrigued by how Burnham chooses to address Musk, actually, because you saw when he accepted the result in Makerfield and he was standing outside Ashton FC football ground. He warned that Britain risked becoming more like the US and he described that trend. I wonder if we've got the clip. We can just play you now.
There was a risk, if you like, that we would carry on seeing Britain and the politics of our country go down a path towards greater darkness and division and ending up somewhere like the United States of America, where people don't talk to each other in the street if they vote different ways or in their workplace. We will not let that happen here. We will bring people back home.
So, yeah, that's Andy Burnham saying, look, we mustn't become America. In terms of his handling of Donald Trump, if you look at Donald Trump's approval ratings in the UK, they are absolutely in the toilet. No one with reform voters, even with reform voters. And that's why you see Nigel Farage putting distance himself between Trump and, you know, his own kind of leadership of reform.
And I just think that so Andy Burnham, if there is an election soon, we'll be thinking, right, I've got nothing to gain from sucking up to Trump. And I don't think you're going to see a moment, anything like, you know, Keir Starmer brandishing the envelope from his breast pocket of his suit to Donald Trump. It seems like a different age. Doesn't that seem like a different age?
Donald Trump, the new president. Let me go and suck up to him and see whether I can, you know, get him to kiss my ass. That's it.
I think arguably the funny thing is you could argue that it's exactly the same age. It's just that Starmer completely misread it. And I think that what Burnham will try and do, I think Starmer's, if you were going to critique Starmer's approach of Trump, and I would say, you know, you could say he had to try, but it was not to explain to the country that,
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Chapter 5: What implications does Burnham's premiership have for UK foreign policy?
and that's going to require a different approach. For example, it might be... Defence spending, yeah.
..raise taxes to fund defence spending, whereas what Starmer did for a long time, like a lot of the rest of you, was just sort of do sort of Trump Mark I all over again, which is just sort of go, he's actually a lot more normal as an American president, you think, listen to what he does, not what he says, all those clichés, whereas actually, as we said at the time, you know, this was a different sort of Trump, even compared to a nought to Trump last time.
I do think you have to cut him some slack for... how he read the room in sort of January, February of 2025. That was before the ICE raids. That was before the political arrests. That was before the invasion of Venezuela and Iran. I'm not saying that we couldn't see the type of presidency that was going to unroll.
But from Starmer's position, I think at that point, he just knew he had to get the trade deal. And when he came back with a trade deal, having had his, you know, his ambassador in place, that the perception was that he'd done well. You know, he'd been the first in there. He'd come away with the trade deal. He notched it up as a win. Now, I think a lot of us were feeling queasy.
And it was the day after Zelensky. It was the day after the Zelensky meeting, which was an absolute shit show.
Yeah. So I think, you know, I think a lot of us who had followed the Trump sort of psychodrama for the last 10 years were already feeling queasy about that. But from the position of was Starmer right to hope that it would unroll in a clever way or a good way as opposed to a terrible tariff way. Yeah, he was right.
Surely he's going to go for the Goldilocks strategy of just not too hot and not too cold.
That's why they stay away.
Yeah. Well, you do enough that you keep the relationship on track and businesslike and cordial when you meet. But you don't start going desperately trying to ingratiate yourself. You don't back down. Or desperately trying to start a war with Trump because there's not much to be had there either.
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Chapter 6: How might Burnham's approach to North Sea oil and gas impact his relationship with Trump?
This is this is the recipe for hope. There is something that he's learned from Starmer already, which is don't go in and tell the electorate that their lives are going to become even more shit, that they're going to have a terrible time, that it's all going to be depressing.
What Mamdani does, whether it's with the Knicks, whether it's with, you know, basketball or whether it's with sort of bringing New Yorkers together and actually The stuff that that Burnham was saying on the stump there, which was let's let's try and love our neighbours. Let's try and kind of sit down, have a meal with our neighbours is exactly the stuff that you have from Mamdani.
There is this sense of kind of let's find the joy in politics again, which frankly has been completely missing.
Well, I mean, in that sense with Burnham, in a way, this is why one of the reasons he's here in the first place, he can kind of thank Trump for it in one sense, which is that like. Labour is looking for its answer to algorithmic politics and algorithmic media, which is basically the Trump era and the Mamdani era. Mamdani is a kind of democratic answer to the Democratic Party, to Trump.
And in a way, Burnham is Labour Party's answer to that Trump era. One of the reasons Starmer is not going to be there anymore is because he sat so ill at ease, so badly, so uneasily, with politics in the long shadow of Trump and the way he does media and the way that, frankly, we've learned to do media from him.
So we're already seeing that with these selfies and all the selfie videos and all of that, that Burnham just takes to that like a duck to water in a way that whatever his wider merits, Starmer never did.
Well, let's talk about the wider merits of Keir Starmer or otherwise in just a moment.
In the first two years of this government, we had really important progress on immigration. And one of the tests of an outgoing prime minister is whether you leave the country in a better state than you found it. And I am leaving it in a better state. Immigration has long been a cause for concern. On lawful migration, which when we came in two years ago, was nearly a million net migration.
We got that down to about a fifth of that number. So a huge reduction, over 80% reduction. On the crossings across the channel, which so many people are concerned about, understandably, we've brought those numbers down as well. So the steps we've taken are beginning to pay off.
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Chapter 7: What challenges does Burnham face in establishing his leadership style?
But ultimately, we are in this age, to go back to that last chat, of algorithmic politics, where you have to try and get your message across. You have to be louder and have something to say. And that was never Starmer's style. I think, unfortunately, he is a politician. I almost think it would be like sort of bringing Macmillan or someone into the kind of...
sort of era of modern politics he doesn't sit easily with it and I think unfortunately from day one he was doomed for that reason.
I have been amazed frankly at the kind of communal shrug with which the political world has just accepted the Starmer resignation as if it's a totally normal way to start the week and I think it's the normality that quietly kills me because it shouldn't be that easy, should it? To just sort of wave off someone that we have democratically elected as our prime minister.
And yes, in a way, there's something extraordinary about the bloodlessness of the coup. The fact that the party on the surface is not divided, it's not tribal, it's kind of getting on with what's happened. But I don't think that that's necessarily where the country is. I think it's something more subtle than outrage because...
A lot of the people who are quietly aghast at what has happened would also, frankly, admit, like you say, Lewis, that maybe he wasn't brilliantly suited to the job, that he struggled with his own party, his own MPs, his own policies. He changed his mind. We've been through that. We know that we've said before there wasn't a clear narrative, a clear story.
And yet the swiftness of the heist and the idea was less of a butchering and more of a sort of stun gun to the head, I think, has just sort of. left us all reeling a bit as a country that it shouldn't be that easy. Should it? It shouldn't be that easy just to kind of go, yeah, okay, well done, yeah, bye. I mean, he gave the speech at 9.30. By 9.40, he'd walked back inside.
And by 10.50, Andy Burnham... was on his train and we had the choppers already following the train down. And I just, I feel like the sort of the speed at which that happened is slightly nauseating.
Well, you see, I would actually disagree. I actually think it should be that easy. Or at least I actually think, I don't think it was that easy because the truth is, is that, you know, this is attempts to get rid of him have been underway for a long time. And he, a prime minister, you know, he dug in, he dug in for as long as possible. And people talk about the heist or about Burnham.
We've talked about it. But the truth is, It wasn't really a... I mean, you know, it was a heist in the sense that it was an extraordinary act to sort of inveigle yourself into Parliament through that by-election, win it and so on, and that took guts. But it wasn't Burnham that did it for Starmer. What did it for Starmer is the fact he had no support left among his own MPs or almost none.
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Chapter 8: How does public perception of Trump affect Burnham's political strategy?
You could say he had the skill to work out that Yvette Cooper wasn't going to do the thing that Shabana Mahmood did and he put her into the right role.
Although Yvette's people would say that they're the ones who started it.
That maybe they started it. OK, I mean, fair enough. But if you want to look at wins, they have borrowed to invest. They put another £144 billion into infrastructure investment. They have brought down immigration. They have managed somehow... to swerve up to this point, inflation that we're expecting as a result of the Iran war.
I think you can point to the winds, but I'm still not even saying that that's That's what I'm feeling uncomfortable about. What I'm feeling uncomfortable about is just the speed at which we have kind of like packed up and moved on. It's like we're a pop up shop of prime ministers and that's just gone now.
You know, there's something about our politics. I mean, we talked yesterday about the language on British politics and, you know, kind of whether Kemi Badenoch had gone too far in what she'd said about Bridget Phillips and the education secretary. Look, the language of our politics isn't as rough as it is in America. But the casual brutality of our politics is way, way worse than America.
I don't think we'd be brutal enough. I think someone should be gone now.
Well, you know, you have a general election.
in britain and the prime minister is being shown out the door the serving prime minister is being shown out the door first thing the next morning get out the new prime minister is going to be arriving by 11 o'clock your piano is in the street get the removal men in you're out and on the civil service are there applauding nicely as the new prime minister walks in that is the brutality
of British politics but also not just the brutality as in on a personal level it's very sad but it's if you talk to the civil servants and it's interesting actually that one of the things I think some did really wrong and we talked about it yesterday was the removal of Ollie Robbins the sort of the blame game which was not very yeah it was ugly and
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