The route to 10 Downing Street is often fairly parochial, requiring knowledge and experience of local or national issues, rather than international ones. Andy Burnham has been involved in politics for a quarter of a century. But his variety of posts gives us little indication of how he is likely to manage relations with key allies and the UK’s role in various parts of the world.

Burnham has just appointed Ed Miliband (who opposed further North Sea exploitation) as foreign secretary. This suggests a willingness to risk the disapproval of Donald Trump. With the exception of his brother David, Miliband is the first Jewish person to hold the post since Malcolm Rifkind in the 1990s and favours a strong relationship with Israel but is no Zionist.

So many premierships become dominated by international affairs that it is easy to forget just how rarely new prime ministers show a keen interest in foreign policy. Burnham is not alone in this. (Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill are, of course, major exceptions, and Boris Johnson had already been foreign secretary before becoming PM).

Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher were more typical in coming to office with little knowledge of, or concern for, global politics. The former admitted of Afghanistan that he initially “knew little” of it. Yet within a few years, an adviser remarked that Blair seemed “almost bored with all the ordinary stuff and interested only in all the foreign........

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