Trump Praises Business Ties with Burnham but Slams Chagos Agreement

US President Donald Trump has said he believes he can work constructively with Andy Burnham, following their first in-person meeting.

Trump indicated that UK-US relations have improved since Burnham took office, speaking on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Burnham said he had built a strong rapport with Trump and that the two leaders had advanced their discussions on trade and immigration during the encounter.

However, the US president was explicit in his criticism of the UK’s agreement to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius while leasing back a joint UK-US military base on Diego Garcia, the archipelago’s largest island, calling it a “terrible” deal.

Trump and Burnham met on Tuesday during the annual gathering of world leaders at the UN.

After their bilateral talks, Burnham stood alongside Trump and opened with the words: “You and I have established a good connection in our early discussions and we’ve taken that further today.”

The two leaders then took questions from the assembled press corps.

Asked by the BBC whether Burnham was someone he could do business with, Trump replied: “Yeah I do, I think he’s a natural businessperson, we’ve had a lot of discussions even before this meeting we’ve spoken to each other numerous times on the phone.”

He added: “Yeah, I think so, he gets it, he understands what he has to do.”

Burnham later said he had told Trump that Britain has experienced “too much turbulence” in recent times but that it was time to turn the country’s story into a positive one.

Trump said the UK is a country of “great patriotism” and that he believes it is “waiting for good leadership, waiting for success”.

Relations between Sir Keir Starmer and Trump also got off to a positive start before growing strained earlier this year, when the then-prime minister declined to approve the use of UK bases for the initial US-Israel strikes on Iran.

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