It’s all starting to feel very real now. Or so Andy Burnham said on the day he in effect became Britain’s official prime minister-in-waiting; a moment both heady and sobering.

The papers are signed, the die cast. Keir Starmer has yet to leave the building, but his party is already talking about him as if he somehow couldn’t hear. On Friday, Burnham made his first brutal break with his predecessor, apologising over Starmer’s head for Labour’s handling of the war in Gaza. The government should, he said, have called for a ceasefire earlier, and should now be increasing pressure on Israel.

Since the Foreign Office is already considering further sanctions, that’s arguably less a dramatic foreign policy shift than a change of domestic tone. Recognising the deep anguish on the left over Gaza, which undoubtedly drove some Labour voters to the Greens, Burnham is signalling that for good or ill he’ll listen more closely to the grassroots than Starmer did. (Though some won’t be satisfied until he calls the war a genocide and bans arms sales.) But like any attempt to toughen British policy on Israel, it also raises some intriguing questions for his relationship with the White House.

How will the man Donald Trump dismissed as “the mayor of a town” deal, in office, with this impossible president? Though it’s business as usual in some ways – Burnham committed this week to the 3.5% Nato target for defence spending, though without explaining how it will be paid for, and to keeping Jonathan Powell as national security adviser – he enters office at a tipping point for the US’s relationship with the west.

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, is telling anyone who will listen – including the Burnham camp, to which he is well connected via his adviser Andy Haldane, his old deputy when he ran the Bank of England – that the old America isn’t........

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