The US President has called Andy Burnham ‘extremely liberal’ – while admitting that he does not know much about the potential UK prime minister.
Mr Burnham is the clear favourite to succeed the outgoing Prime Minister as the Labour premier, Donald Trump described him as ‘the mayor of a town’, adding that he ‘probably won’t open up the North Sea’.
The President had overtime has faulted Sir Keir Starmer during his two-year tenure over his energy policy and for not allowing further oil drilling in the North Sea, while permitting wind turbines.
Asked at the White House what he knew about the new Makerfield MP – who has alluded to the US leader’s politics as ‘poisonous’ – Mr Trump said: ‘I don’t know, I think I see that he was, I guess, the mayor of a town.
‘I hear he’s extremely liberal, extremely, so that means he probably won’t open up the North Sea.’
When Trump first heard of Starmer’s resignation, he wrote in a damning post on Truth Social that the PM had ‘failed badly on two very important subjects- IMMIGRATION AND ENERGY (OPEN NORTH SEA OIL!)’.
The US President recalled he ‘gave Keir Starmer some pretty good advice’.
‘I said, open up the North Sea, go to Aberdeen, which was the hottest city of the whole continent. It was the oil city of Europe, and they closed everything. It was terrible. I couldn’t believe it.
‘The North Sea is loaded. I have had every oil company come to see me “Sir. could you give us access to the UK? We would do anything to drill in the North Sea”.
‘The amazing thing is, they buy their oil from Norway, which gets the oil from the North Sea. Think of it, and they pay a big premium.
‘Norway’s got now two trillion dollars in the bank, and the UK is dying, so they should open up the North Sea, and it’s an easy one, and a lot of good things are going to happen. It’s among the greatest deals in the world,’ he closed.
