Andy Burnham has made a rod for his own back ahead of meeting with Trump… and a major blow-up is coming

DONALD TRUMP hates the United Nations. Not just the hectoring talking shop that sends only “strongly worded letters”, while “funding an assault on Western countries and their borders”. Andy Burnham has made a rod for his own back ahead of meeting with Trump… and a major blow-up is coming Burnham, will not so much roar on to the world stage this Tuesday, but shuffle awkwardly through dimly-lit corridors for his first meeting with Trump Credit: PA No, he detests the very UN building itself. The ugliest offices in New York’s Midtown shunned a glow-up offer from the real-estate mogul at the turn of the century and he has been sore about it ever since. Sign up for The Sun newsletter Thank you! Last year, he raged about its “plastic” interiors and cheap flooring, using his address to world leaders to say: “You walk on terrazzo, do you notice? They still didn’t even get the marble floors I ­promised them.” So, just hours before the Free World’s leader rolls out the red carpet in Washington DC for the head honcho of Communist China, any other meeting held in the soulless, windowless UN HQ is surely a snub to the visiting party. Especially when it is between the two ­leaders of — allegedly — the most special of allies, America and the UK. Well, from what I hear, it could last only minutes. Yes, our PM, Andy Burnham, will not so much roar on to the world stage this Tuesday, but shuffle awkwardly through dimly-lit corridors for his first meeting with a US President he once branded “poisonous”. Labour PMs have a far-from-illustrious record for hastily convened meetings behind the drab concrete-and-glass facade of the UN. Most read in The Sun In 2009, our then-PM Gordon Brown was humiliated by Barack Obama after begging five times for face-time, only to be granted a 15-minute walk and talk in the kitchens. The US had clearly heard Brown try to blame the UK’s dire unpreparedness for the 2008 financial crash on them, rather than his own overspending and fiscal mismanagement as Chancellor before becoming PM. They were not in the mood to play nice. Since then, and for obvious reasons, British PMs have tried to avoid such humiliation rather than run towards it strumming a guitar. While Tuesday’s planned sit-down will at least have chairs, it will be a far cry from the traditional Oval Office welcome more befitting of British PMs — or even a visit to Trump Tower around the corner from the UN in the Big Apple. UK Government insiders are confident they can get out unscathed by sticking to big-picture chats on AI safety, Iran and Ukraine — and insist Our Andy’s easy charm and conversation have worked well in his two calls with Trump. Meanwhile, the Deep State on each side of the Atlantic insists the Special Relationship is about more than two figureheads. It notes that Britain has the world’s best tariff deal with the US and that the levels of coordination between security agencies, as well as financial institutions, are second to none. The mood music going into Tuesday is ominous — not least with Trump’s call for a united Ireland last week Credit: AFP Burnham creeping up to Mark Carney as they were pictured together watching Everton play Credit: AFP But others are rightly bricking their kecks, noting Burnham’s tendency to brush over major problems and ­differences with humour might not be enough for the big league. The mood music going into Tuesday is ominous — not least with Trump’s call for a united Ireland last week and ­his ­mutterings about why the UK needs the Falklands so much when it is busy trying to offload the Chagos Islands. Though the UK’s sale of the latter to Mauritius has now been kicked into long grass, the US remains baffled about why we are so keen to keep one strategically questionable archipelago in the South Atlantic while going hell for leather to dispose of a far more critical one in the Indian Ocean. Add to that a row over a US diplomat accused of being a paedo being spirited out of the UK under the nose of our law enforcement, plus Burnham’s noted desire to hike taxes and regulation on US tech giants, and you can see why there are some nerves in officialdom. Yet Labour MPs will delight in the low-key nature of the meeting, given No10’s multi-pronged sell-out to the hard Left, distancing itself from both the Starmer era and Trump. Going into this meeting, Burnham has done pretty much all he can to make a rod for his own back with the White House. Our Foreign Office has been working hard to avoid a blow-up over Labour’s sanctioning of Israel — to win support lost to the Greens — the PM’s ­personal behaviour in the last week can be best described as bold. Creeping up to Mark Carney as they were pictured together watching Everton play was thumbing his nose to the US administration — currently in a trade ­dispute and war of words with the Canadian PM. Trump has also questioned why the UK needs the Falklands so much when it is busy trying to offload the Chagos Islands Credit: EPA Though the UK’s sale of Chagos to Mauritius has now been kicked into long grass Credit: AFP Meanwhile, Burnham and his ministers continue to beg for scraps from the EU’s table as Labour strategists appear to put party interests in uniting the Left domestically over ­Britain’s national interests around the globe. Our PM may well secure his flank at home and beat the Greens in the upcoming ­Holborn by-election, but our most important ally and largest trading partner is watching all of this. Closely. I would have thought it went without saying that the role of PM should transcend such naked party-political painting by numbers. But we can add that to the long list of things our new premier has yet to figure out. While Burnham may escape from Tuesday with some light banter and a pat on the back, the direction of travel for his government is clear to see. Come the Budget, as ­Labour’s overspending and dire record on growth come home to roost, how far will Burnham and Chancellor John Healey go in trying to put the blame on the US and its war on Iran? We can guess the answer to that, despite it not having worked so very well for Gordon Brown. A major blow-up is coming — if not on Tuesday, then soon. FOR a decade, the UK has been seen as the sick man of the world when it came to its uniquely terrible productivity numbers. In the wake of the financial crash, we were told we had to be more European in our world of high taxation, high spending and highly-regulated workers in order to achieve similar numbers to our nearest neighbours. Now, those geniuses at the Office for National Statistics have admitted that once again they borked the data and, actually, Britain’s output is far healthier than we have been told. A decade of policy opportunity has been lost because once again the bean counters can’t count. But while we are actually on a par with similar European economies, the United States’ productivity data far outpaces us all. But time and again, Labour ministers insist our future lies by tilting back toward Brussels. Their pro-EU ideology is blinding them to the truth laid bare in the stats. Comment now