Burnham's First Meeting With Trump Goes Smoothly, Pivots to AI Push

British leader Andy Burnham met US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, a first face-to-face encounter his team described as smooth and which allowed him to reinforce Britain's international position.

Trump praised Burnham as a "natural business person" and a patriot, saying the two had spoken numerous times by phone before the roughly 40-minute meeting. "I think right now, based on my relationship with the prime minister, Andy, I think that ... we're doing very well," Trump said. Burnham, who replaced Keir Starmer in July as Britain's seventh prime minister in a decade, had travelled to New York on Monday for a single day of the UNGA session.

The US president did raise one objection: Britain's agreement, reached under Starmer, to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius while retaining a 99-year lease on the Diego Garcia air base. Trump called the deal "terrible" and said he expected Burnham to review it, with the British leader appearing to agree. Other bilateral irritants — Britain's block on imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and its refusal to back the US on the Iran war — were passed over without incident.

With the meeting behind him, Burnham is focusing on artificial intelligence, a theme he hopes will help Britain reclaim a leading global role. At an earlier business roundtable that included Apple chairman Tim Cook and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, he said he would make the case for Britain in a speech later on Tuesday, calling for "a single set of global principles and standards" to unlock AI's potential and lift sluggish growth. He described Britain as having endured a decade of political turbulence since the 2016 Brexit vote and said he wanted to be a "circuit breaker" by offering a clear 10-year plan. Burnham's embrace of AI appeared to resonate with Trump, whose administration has favoured light-touch regulation of the technology.