The Trump faithful are gearing up to destroy Burnham

Labour may not yet have clocked it, but on the very day that Andy Burnham is due to celebrate his election as Sir Keir Starmer’s replacement, the 02 InterContinental Hotel in Greenwich will be hosting an enormous gathering of party opponents determined to rain on his parade.

For the first time ever, America’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be rolling into the capital. “Save Britain. Save The West” is the event’s aspirational catchphrase, reflective of US President Donald Trump’s view that Europe’s “civilisational collapse” can only be averted if the UK now takes leading and appropriate action.

The President has already made it clear that to satisfy him, Burnham will need to adopt three central policy planks if he is to turn Britain around.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

First, Trump has relentlessly pushed Starmer to allow fresh drilling for North Sea oil and gas. Last week in the Oval Office, he indicated that he knew nothing about Burnham and yet described him as “extremely liberal”, saying “that means he probably won’t open up the North Sea”.

In fact, there is every possibility that Burnham will confound both Trump and current Energy Secretary Ed Miliband by approving fresh fossil fuel extraction from the waters off Aberdeen. In recent months, he has abandoned his long-held outright opposition to the idea and now describes himself as “open-minded” as the country’s trade unions urge action to boost jobs and lower energy prices by reversing the Government’s current course.

The second item on Trump’s wish list for Britain will be much harder for Burnham to embrace. The President wants the UK to seal its borders to migrants, in the same way that he has closed America off as a destination for virtually all refugees and asylum seekers. However tough Burnham wants to get on immigration, Labour MPs would never back the wholesale reversal of Britain’s humanitarian approach to those people fleeing strife-torn nations.

Thirdly, Trump wants a crackdown on crime, by which he means the mass deportation of immigrants like those that Americans have witnessed since he returned to power last year. For that kind of policy, Reform UK and Restore Britain are already much closer to Trump’s heart, as the CPAC event in London will amply prove.

The climax of the three-day conference comes on Saturday 18 July, the day after Labour MPs are slated to engage in Burnham’s coronation. CPAC Great Britain, chaired by the former prime minister Liz Truss, is promising to assemble “major speakers from across the United States, the United Kingdom, and aligned global movements to chart a course for a prosperous, sovereign future”. Truss claims it “will not just be a conference; it will be a launchpad for the policies and leaders that will shape the future of the West”.

Keynote speakers include Reform’s leader Nigel Farage, the party’s runner-up in the Gorton and Denton by-election Matt Goodwin, Lucy Connolly, who was recently released from prison after being jailed for inciting racial hatred online during the Southport riots and the former minister for Brexit opportunities Jacob Rees-Mogg.

But it will be the Americans in attendance who may unleash a fresh Trump-inspired assault on Burnham. They will include CPAC’s chairman and prominent Trump influencer Matt Schlapp, alt-right political activist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and pro-Trump publisher Paul Du Quenoy, who helms the Palm Beach Freedom Institute, a stone’s throw from the President’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida.

Last week, London got a taste of the language that may feature prominently at CPAC Great Britain. Sarah B Rogers, Trump’s aggressive, outspoken and fast-rising Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, launched a full-throated assault on the UK in a speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, founded by conservative Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.

Rogers railed against Britain, repeatedly describing it as “Da Yookay”, a meme embraced by far-right figures to parody the country’s multicultural society. She portrayed Britain as a country “where you can be remanded without bail for an inflammatory tweet while a psychopath who seizes a three-year-old and feeds him to crocodiles walks free”.

She claimed that “some people look at Britain’s thousands of speech arrests per year and see only tyranny”. In a reference to the fatal stabbing of murder of teenager Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa, a British-born Sikh, she fumed about a country where “cops defer to a murderer who calls his victim racist. Then they handcuff you as you bleed to death if you’re white.”

Her speech at Olympia in west London was the single-most outspoken critique of Labour-led Britain by any US government official on UK soil. After it was over, a Government spokesman hit back, saying: “Our world-renowned justice system operates without fear or favour to protect all our citizens, and we completely reject this characterisation.”

America’s far right is only just getting started with its efforts to undermine Burnham and boost the prospects of both Reform and Restore Britain in the country’s next election. The Trump administration’s official National Security Strategy identifies only one reason for optimism in Europe: “The growing influence of patriotic European parties.”

By that, neither Trump nor his CPAC friends mean Labour or Burnham.