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It’s all starting to feel very real now. Or so Andy Burnham said on the day he in effect became Britain’s official prime minister-in-waiting; a moment both heady and sobering.
The papers are signed, the die cast. Keir Starmer has yet to leave the building, but his party is already talking about him as if he somehow couldn’t hear. On Friday, Burnham made his first brutal break with his predecessor, apologising over Starmer’s head for Labour’s handling of the war in Gaza. The government should, he said, have called for a ceasefire earlier, and should now be increasing pressure on Israel.
Since the Foreign Office is already considering further sanctions, that’s arguably less a dramatic foreign policy shift than a change of domestic tone. Recognising the deep anguish on the left over Gaza, which undoubtedly drove some Labour voters to the Greens, Burnham is signalling that for good or ill he’ll listen more closely to the grassroots than Starmer did. (Though some won’t be satisfied until he calls the war a genocide and bans arms sales.) But like any attempt to toughen British policy on Israel, it also raises some intriguing questions for his relationship with the White House.
How will the man Donald Trump dismissed as “the mayor of a town” deal, in office, with this impossible president? Though it’s business as usual in some ways – Burnham committed this week to the 3.5% Nato target for defence spending, though without explaining how it will be paid for, and to keeping Jonathan Powell as national security adviser – he enters office at a tipping point for the US’s relationship with the west.
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, is telling anyone who will listen – including the Burnham camp, to which he is well connected via his adviser Andy Haldane, his old deputy when he ran the Bank of England – that the old America isn’t coming back. Even Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the president’s former favourite, seems to have lost patience with him.
Frustration was palpable at this week’s Nato summit in Ankara, where Trump threatened to ban trade with Spain if it doesn’t obey his demands for more defence spending; confirmed his desire to own Greenland; and tore up a fragile Gulf ceasefire by resuming the bombing of Iran. More disconcerting even than the resulting rise in oil prices is the prospect of a new kind of rolling conflict in the Gulf that would be the lethal equivalent of Trump’s endlessly on-again, off-again trade wars, conducted with scant regard for existing norms or damage to allies.
In his bluntly titled new book Ten Steps to Prevent World War Three, the former Foreign Office minister and soldier Tobias Ellwood depicts a future where such conflicts are routine. It opens in 2040, imagining the west looking back and ruing the chances missed in the mid-2020s to avert disaster. For by 2040, it’s too late: Trump’s bulldozing of rules-based world order has allowed China to occupy the vacuum, building a new order through strategic alliances with Russia and others that is based on coercion, destabilisation and deniable attacks.
Ellwood’s third world war isn’t one territorial battle but a series of localised and proxy conflicts around the globe, creating a climate of near-permanent violence and insecurity in which battlefield taboos – including over the use of tactical nuclear weapons – are routinely broken. Greenland is gone, Nato collapsed, and western governments reduced to managing decline. Climate disasters or disease outbreaks hit harder than they otherwise would have, because countries won’t cooperate against shared threats. It’s just one possible scenario, Ellwood stresses, not a prediction. But it’s a little too plausible for comfort.
His prescription for avoiding it begins with defining exactly which bits of the rules-based world order the west seeks to defend, and then circling the wagons of like-minded countries around them. Rejoin the single market, share renewable energy technology with poorer countries, widen European military participation in rapidly deployable forces, and forge a new “stability alliance” of middle-ranking powers – from Europe to Canada, and India to Brazil – focused on early prevention and de-escalation of conflicts before they reach all-out war.
This agenda isn’t a terrible fit for Burnham, whose skill as a mayor was in convening alliances of the like-minded, and who already preaches early intervention in domestic policy. But it leaves open the question of how far to go in confronting the man it’s designed to contain. The case for making nice with Trump has always been that lives depended on it: Ukraine needed US help to fight Russia, Europe needed time to re-arm, and Britain relies too heavily on Washington for its nuclear deterrent and for intelligence sharing to play hardball.
But the threat to Greenland, repeated this week, convinced many European leaders that something had to change. Ukraine still needs US assistance, but less than it did now, having built up its own defence manufacturing capabilities; and it’s the EU now paying for the weapons that Washington supplies, a deal with which Trump seems content judging by the way he praised Ukraine’s audacious drone strikes inside Russia this week. (Perversely reluctant to help Ukraine when it most needed him, he never misses an opportunity to be associated with success.)
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Starmer wasn’t wrong to make those grovelling trips to Washington. He can be proud of helping buy time for Ukraine, which used it with extraordinary ingenuity and courage, and for many of its neighbours. The country that wasted that grace period, ironically, was Britain. Having never properly made the public case for more defence spending, let alone for funding it, Starmer now bequeaths that mess – alongside some momentous choices over the special relationship – to a still very green successor.
If he means what he says about spending less time on foreign affairs than “never here Keir”, in the circumstances Burnham will need an extraordinary foreign secretary. (David Miliband, who held the job under Gordon Brown and might well have become Britain’s ambassador to Washington had Kamala Harris won in 2024, is now visibly auditioning.)
But he’ll also have to master something Starmer couldn’t, which one former foreign secretary calls the art of titration: measuring the dosage of each fractional policy shift or symbolic gesture so it’s just enough to cause the desired reaction and no more. Assertive enough on Gaza not to seem morally complicit, yet without denying Israel’s right to self-defence. Not too close to Trump, but just close enough. And each time with a hair’s breadth separating success from the kind of failure that by 2040 our children may bitterly regret. Burnham is right about one thing: it doesn’t get more real than that.
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Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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