Gaby Hinsliff says Andy Burnham must learn to handle Donald Trump

Andy Burnham has begun his pitch as Labour’s next leader by apologising for the party’s Gaza stance over Keir Starmer’s head, according to The Guardian. The intervention, delivered on a Friday shortly before Gaby Hinsliff’s column, pairs a promise of tougher pressure on Israel with a warning that Labour cannot afford another foreign-policy drift as Donald Trump’s White House grows more volatile.

Hinsliff frames Burnham’s move as both a moral correction and an internal management tactic. Gaza has become a proxy for a larger argument inside Labour about who the party is meant to answer to: activists demanding maximal distance from Israel, or a leadership wary of being cornered into gestures that clash with alliances and procurement. The Foreign Office is said to be considering further Gaza-related sanctions, a reminder that “values” in diplomacy often arrive as paperwork—lists, carve-outs, and enforcement decisions that can be dialled up or down without ever changing the headline position.

Trump sits in the background as the constraint that turns every British foreign-policy statement into a negotiation with an unpredictable counterparty. Hinsliff notes that Trump has previously dismissed Burnham as “the mayor of a town,” and points to a NATO summit in Ankara where Trump threatened trade retaliation against Spain over defence spending and repeated his desire to own Greenland. The column also ties Trump’s resumption of bombing in Iran to rising oil prices, sketching a pattern in which military action functions like one more lever in an on-again, off-again cycle of shocks—similar in rhythm, if not in mechanism, to tariff threats.

Burnham’s own commitments, as described, underline the arithmetic problem that sits beneath the rhetoric. He backs the NATO target of 3.5% defence spending but does not say how it would be funded; he also signals continuity by keeping Jonathan Powell as national security adviser. Those choices point to a leadership posture that wants the credibility of firmness without paying the immediate political cost of spelling out taxes, cuts, or borrowing.

The column brings in Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney, who is said to be telling people that “the old America isn’t coming back,” and links Burnham’s circle to Carney via Andy Haldane. It is a small detail, but it captures how policy networks work in practice: the same names recur across countries, and private conversations often travel faster than parliamentary debates. Hinsliff also notes that Italy’s Giorgia Meloni—once a Trump favourite—appears to have lost patience with him, suggesting that even leaders who tried to treat Trump as manageable have found the transaction costs rising.

To dramatise the stakes, Hinsliff cites Tobias Ellwood’s book Ten Steps to Prevent World War Three, which imagines a future where the West regrets missed chances in the mid-2020s. In Ellwood’s scenario, Trump’s weakening of the rules-based order leaves room for China to build alliances with Russia and others through coercion, with global security degrading into rolling proxy conflicts.

Burnham is trying to show he can satisfy Labour’s grassroots on Gaza while navigating a Washington that prices loyalty in public and revises terms without notice. For now, the clearest number attached to the pitch is still the one without a funding plan: 3.5%.