Insight: What can we expect from Burnham's meeting with Trump?

New Prime Minister Andy Burnham will today meet US President Donald Trump in person as world leaders gather for the UN general assembly in New York. The Prime Minister will have his own bilateral with Trump later this afternoon, with the discussion expected to take up 30 minutes of Burnham’s fleeting 24-hour trip.

There’s a lot riding on the success of this meet-up: the Prime Minister says he is determined to find common ground with Trump, but a misstep with the US President could have serious ramifications for the special relationship, no matter how convivial the pair’s phone exchanges have been so far.

So what should we expect the two leaders to discuss? There are a host of possible topics on the table: trade, the future of the North Sea and the ongoing Ukraine war.

Trump has previously said that he has liked what Burnham has said about oil and gas – but with the government’s decisions on Rosebank and Jackdaw still pending, this may no longer be an area of common ground. (There is a widespread view within Labour that the delays are in part thanks to the looming Holborn and St Pancras by-election, triggered after Sir Keir Starmer announced he was quitting as an MP – with the seat a key target for the Greens.)

Another sore spot could be that Burnham has, in the past, been rather disparaging about Trump. When quizzed by lobby journalists on this subject en route to New York, the Prime Minister replied: “Politicians say things throughout their career, but now the important thing is to focus on the moment you are in.” He’ll be hoping the US President feels the same.

A slightly complicating factor is that Trump’s current feud with the US media means that none of the meetings the President will attend today will be filmed by the White House camera pool. It comes after he banned three media outlets from the White House yesterday, accusing them of spreading “fake news”, which prompted a boycott of Trump’s events by other US broadcasters.

During the rest of his visit, Andy Burnham hopes to focus on artificial intelligence. He’s taken his new AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, to New York with him, and at the same summit, OpenAI boss Sam Altman will be addressing the UN Security Council.

These developments follow weeks of growing concern about the risks of AI after the high-profile resignation of a researcher from tech firm Anthropic, who claimed that those building AI models believe the tech ‘could kill us all by the end of the decade’. Only this morning, the cross-party business committee has published invitations to Meta, Google, Open AI and Anthropic, asking them to give evidence on AI security. Critics have called this fearmongering, but it has sparked a wider debate about the regulation of artificial intelligence, which Burnham hopes to lead on.

Ultimately, though, nothing is set in stone. Downing Street officials will be all too aware of how frequently the US President goes off-piste – and so even their best-laid plans could be derailed.