LONDON — Mark Carney and Andy Burnham meet for the first time Wednesday — and it’s not just a love of Everton Football Club uniting the Canadian prime minister and his newly-installed British counterpart. The meeting of the two world leaders is set to mark Burnham’s return to public duty since the death of his father on Monday. The bereavement for the British prime minister meant final details of the visit were being nailed down at the time of publication, but No.10 Downing Street confirmed it would still include a chance for the pair to bond over their support for the Premier League side.
After televised opening remarks — and as journalists try and decipher a written readout of the behind-closed-doors meeting — there are plans for the pair to retire to the Hill Dickinson Stadium in Liverpool. There they'll watch the Toffees play Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Carabao Cup third round, at 7.45 p.m. Beyond the football, it is hard to think of two leaders with more in common.
At 61, Carney is just five years older than Burnham. Both men did big jobs before their stints at the top of politics. Carney ran the Bank of Canada, and was tapped up to do the same job at the Bank of England during the tumultuous Brexit years.
He returned to Canada to succeed a struggling Justin Trudeau and turn around the Liberal Party’s fortunes. Burnham is the former mayor of Greater Manchester who came back to Westminster politics to replace a flailing Keir Starmer, and try to save Labour from the electoral abyss. Crucially, both men are now at the helm of middle powers trying to work out how to live in Donald Trump's world.
After a punchy Davos speech in January called for smaller nations to band together in a world of unpredictable superpowers, Carney is on a goodwill tour of Europe to hammer that point home. Ahead of the meeting, the Canadian prime minister’s office said talks would focus on “priorities for the Canada-UK relationship” — including defense and security, energy, artificial intelligence, and critical minerals. Handily, there’s an agreement already in the works on many of these issues.
In the shadow of Trump’s tariffs on a host of global allies last summer, Carney and then British Prime Minister Starmer promised to craft a new strategic partnership between the two nations. But experts and officials say there's a need to inject momentum into those efforts after Burnham's new government took the reins in July. Since then “there has been some progress,” according to Vina Nadjibulla, co-founder and CEO of the new Canadian foreign policy Centre for Strategic Statecraft think tank.
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