Andy Burnham will keep his cool with Donald Trump and quickly win over other European leaders after he becomes prime minister, Neil Kinnock has insisted.
The former Labour leader admitted pressure would be piled on to the incoming PM, but backed Mr Burnham to deliver in office and succeed on the world stage – including handling the prickly US President.
However, he signalled a potential foreign policy headache ahead for Mr Burnham as he hit out at Labour’s “counterproductive” international aid cuts.
He said his late wife Glenys, a minister under Gordon Brown, would never have stopped fighting the party over the policy.
“Andy’s got to deal with Trump like hedgehogs make love – carefully,” Lord Kinnock, who met Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1984, said in an interview with The Independent.
“That’s just basic, but nobody’s got to tell him that. That’s what he’ll do.”
He added: “The good thing about Andy, he is a very cool guy. He doesn’t burst into flames.
“I’d have had difficulty with Trump because my irritation level is very, very low.
“And Andy’s isn’t, which is a real plus. So he’ll keep his temper, and if he doesn’t actually bite his tongue, he’ll discipline it, so it’ll be okay.”
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When it comes to European leaders, however, they would be “quickly reassured by Andy” after Sir Keir Starmer built “real trust and admiration” across the bloc, he said.
Lord Kinnock, who was speaking to The Independent as part of its Europe: The Way Back campaign, which is calling for the UK to rebuild its relationship with Europe, said Mr Burnham’s passion for devolution, which he talked of in his first major policy speech on Monday, means that “quite a lot of what he’s proposing is conventional politics in much of the rest of Europe… they know what Andy is talking about when he’s talking about devolved empowerment”.
“I think it’ll be a relatively short bridge from trusting Keir to having trust in Andy,” he said.
Lord Kinnock also dismissed criticism from Sir John Major, in this publication last week, who suggested it was a leap to go from being in charge of buses in Manchester to mastering international relations.
Lord Kinnock said it was a “candid appraisal” and “the man on the whole planet who knows that best is called Andy Burnham”.
“He mustn’t be daunted by it, because of course John Major would be the first to recognise that there are some common requirements.”
These included a strong sense of purpose, confidence, the ability to persuade people to work together, to stop them being ideological or dogmatic and to negotiate, he said.
“Both in terms of the clarity of his direction and purpose, which is invaluable – and the fact that he’s a normal guy who can get on with just about anybody – Andy will be fine,” he said.
Lord Kinnock also criticised the government’s decision to fund higher defence spending through cuts to development aid, one of the key passions of Glenys, arguing the policy risked being self-defeating.
He warned that, in conflict situations such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, aid could mean the difference between a young person going to university or getting embroiled in a life of violence.
He said a “reordering of priorities is very much needed, and Glenys would have been arguing for that, ferociously.”
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the (Labour) movement who thinks that she wouldn’t have been disappointed, but she was never silently disappointed. Glenys could be lethally disappointed,” he said.
“She never stopped campaigning.”
He recalled one of her key slogans, which guided her politics: “It’s the duty of those with freedom to expand the liberty of others”.
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