Burnham tries to avoid a slavery reparations ‘disaster’

Prime Minister Andy Burnham will have an unofficial goal when he meets members of Britain’s former empire next week: Avoid a fight about slavery reparations. Good luck, as they say, with that. His predecessor Keir Starmer’s trip to the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, at a beach resort on the Pacific island of Samoa in 2024, is still the stuff of rueful mutters in parts of Whitehall. Lined up in a semi-circle of armchairs — “like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,” as one person briefed on the gathering put it — leaders from many of the 56 Commonwealth nations negotiated live over a 16-page communique on laptops and tablets.

Starmer, a barrister, found himself personally redrafting a key paragraph about reparations on a screen surrounded by other leaders, said two further people briefed on the meeting. The unusually intimate format of the leaders’ retreat meant they had no officials with them on the veranda, and Starmer had just one civil servant — No. 10’s private secretary for foreign affairs — stationed in a tent close by. His chief of staff Morgan McSweeney was woken at 4 a.m. London time by a phone call to talk about the strategy for reparations.

That, however, was never clearly resolved. The retreat dragged on hours late; some leaders left before it was even over. Starmer was frustrated and felt he had been “ambushed,” said one U.K. official involved in the 2024 trip. A second said they had blocked the incident from their memory. A third said Starmer was left “furious,” adding: “He went in blind and it was terrible for him.” A fourth said simply: “It was a disaster.” All were granted anonymity to speak frankly.

The eventual communique agreed on a “conversation towards forging a common future based on equity.” This fudge kicked the issue of reparations down the road — where it now lands in Burnham’s lap. Britain’s new prime minister will touch down at the biennial summit in Antigua and Barbuda next week to find the issue still firmly on some Caribbean and African leaders’ minds. At the United Nations in May, 123 countries passed a motion calling for “inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice.”

The U.K. abstained. Barbados PM Mia Mottley announced a manifesto from Caribbean leaders on the “moral, ethical and legal case” for reparations in June. Commonwealth Secretary-General Shirley Botchwey said last week that an apology for Britain’s role in the slave trade “wouldn’t hurt.” The visit will be a test of how Burnham — who has a reputation for speaking off the cuff, especially on issues of moral justice — maintains a delicate U.K. government line that reparations are not “the answer,” as Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told POLITICO last month .

And Burnham will face that challenge in a unique spotlight: It will be his first overseas visit with King Charles III, who is the head of the Commonwealth. POLITICO spoke to a dozen U.K. officials or politicians who were involved in the 2024 summit or the planning for Burnham’s upcoming visit. They painted a picture of acute anxiety in the British state over how to deal with calls for reparations from its former colonies; tensions between Downing Street and the Foreign Office over the handling of 2024; and serious questions in Whitehall about whether the summit is even useful for No. 10 — despite the king’s role leaving U.K. prime ministers little choice but to attend.

Burnham will not have to deal with the extreme jetlag and communications hurdles that dogged Starmer’s trip, which involved a 28-hour flight in each direction. But like Starmer, he will fly out at a time when his in-tray is crowded by other issues — not least the U.S. midterms happening at the same time and the domestic aftermath of his first budget, just unveiled this past Wednesday. Keir Starmer attends a a state banquet during the CHOGM summit in Samoa, on Oct. 24, 2024. | Pool photo by Fiona Goodall via Getty Images The first U.K. official quoted earlier in this story said: “There’s a sense that there can’t be a repeat of [2024] this time around.”

The third U.K. official quoted above said: “I don’t understand why they’re making the same mistake. Does the prime minister really have to go?” A No. 10 official, however, said Burnham made clear soon after taking power on July 20 that he was “very keen” to attend the summit. Miliband has “laid the groundwork so that things hopefully won’t be as tricky as they were in 2024,” this person added. “Andy’s style is that he is an honest broker with people, and he will give an instinctive response to things,” the official said.

“But the government’s position is clear that reparations are not seen as the right route. It’s a careful balancing act, but one that we’re well prepared for.” Climate resilience fund in the works One tactic for the current No. 10 will be to try to avoid talking about it public. Downing Street has broken with recent precedent by deciding not to bring the usual “pack” of political journalists, taking a smaller media “pool” instead. This will limit the scope of questions that Burnham faces. (Political editors from news outlets, including POLITICO, have written to No. 10 to object to the arrangement.)

Timing could also allow the visit to slip under the radar. Burnham and Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband will be there alongside counterparts including Anthony Albanese of Australia and Mark Carney of Canada, creating a rare opportunity for them to discuss the implications of the U.S. midterm results in private. The symbolism, as “middle power” nations deal with a drift in U.S. relations under Donald Trump, would be obvious. British PM Andy Burnham, center, leaves the stage at the end of the Labour Conference in Liverpool on Sept. 30, 2026. | Ian Forsyth/Getty Images Officially, the agenda is to build an alliance that can boost these middle powers, along with the developing states that global summits usually overlook.

The Commonwealth Secretariat — the London-based body that co-ordinates the summit — said the aim of next week’s gathering is “partnerships and investment,” including in climate and youth employment, and removing trade barriers. Likewise, the U.K. Foreign Office has been working on a climate resilience fund for developing nations, two people with knowledge of the talks said. A third said conversations in the U.K. government had focused on mobilizing public and private finance, and improving access to finance for climate-vulnerable countries.

Three people with knowledge of the planning emphasized that this summit would be an opportunity to build on relations with countries that could discuss bilateral trade, though they did not name specific nations and no U.K. trade ministers are due at the event. “There will obviously be trade and investment discussions with a range of partners,” said one of the three people, a U.K. government official, who also noted that the U.K. will raise the impacts of El Niño. “The bigger picture is that we want to use the Commonwealth network to deepen trade and investment links across its 56 members — that Commonwealth advantage is one of the reasons the grouping matters to the UK.” ‘Playing Scrabble with words’ But leaders at these events, known by the awkward acronym CHOGM, can raise whatever topics they wish — reparations included.

Denis O’Brien, the Irish telecoms billionaire who founded the Repair Campaign calling for financial reparations to the Caribbean in 2022, said: “The conversation has moved radically forward.” He urged Britain and other European nations to “start off with an apology and then have an engagement,” adding: “The Foreign Office and the prime minister’s office are playing Scrabble with words — and unfortunately they’re leaving King Charles, who is so highly respected in the Caribbean, in a very difficult position.”

Paul Boateng, the Labour peer who was Britain’s first Black Cabinet minister and now campaigns on the issue, said Caribbean nations “are going to be pressing it. This issue is not going to go away.” The recent UN resolution reinforced Caribbean and African nations’ argument, argued Boateng: “We can’t be seen to simply ignore it … We cannot hold the Foreign Office line that it changes nothing.” That position cast a long shadow two years ago.

No. 10 flew to Samoa in 2024 insisting reparations were “not on the agenda,” even though the summit’s free-wheeling format meant the choice was effectively out of Downing Street’s hands. This message “went down like a bag of sick” with Caribbean nations who saw it as “colonial” and “arrogant,” recalled one person involved in conversations at the time. The handling created tension between Downing Street and the Foreign Office, then led by David Lammy, who also attended, according to six other people with knowledge of the 2024 trip.

King Charles and Queen Camilla attend the bestowing and farewell ceremony on Oct. 26, 2024. | Pool photo by Manaui Faulalo via Getty Images One of the six people said No. 10 figures had expected the Foreign Office to better manage expectations among Commonwealth nations ahead of Starmer’s arrival. The person said: “No. 10 did not feel like they were well enough informed, and felt some of this could and should have been handled in advance.

There was the feeling that both Lammy and the Foreign Office were institutionally pre-disposed to this sort of stuff and not shutting it down. The PM didn’t know what he was going into.” A second person said: “​​The FCDO world does forget, sometimes, the politics of what’s going on in the U.K. It’s very institutionalized.” A third person stressed that senior aides in No. 10 had blamed Foreign Office officials, not Lammy personally. Before Starmer left office this year, No. 10 had been drawing up plans for Starmer to skip this year’s CHOGM — and send Lammy as his representative.

By then Lammy had been moved from the foreign office and was Starmer’s deputy prime minister. Another of the six people countered that it was No. 10 that persisted, ahead of the 2024 summit, with a line that was too binary — reparatory justice, as campaigners prefer to call it, has a wide definition that includes support for climate adaptation and education — and failed to listen to Foreign Office warnings ahead of time about the strength of feeling among Commonwealth nations.

“The audit trail would completely exonerate David and the Foreign Office,” this person said. They argued No. 10 officials — who were keen to hold on to the mantle of fiscal responsibility ahead of Starmer’s first budget — had viewed the row too much through how it would be perceived by the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper. Two other people with knowledge of the 2024 trip insisted they did not remember any significant friction between No. 10 and the Foreign Office.

Lammy’s office did not immediately respond to an invitation to comment. UK review mooted a scaled-back summit More significantly, the 2024 summit also led to discussions in Whitehall about the set-up of CHOGM itself. Lammy commissioned an internal review by Foreign Office officials on the Commonwealth in the wake of the 2024 summit, his former Special Adviser Ben Judah told POLITICO. Judah said the review suggested reducing the frequency of CHOGMs to “every four or five years,” potentially aligned with the hosting of the Commonwealth Games, and seeking to remove the final communique and leaders’ retreat.

It suggested an investment conference in alternate years modeled on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which could keep the Commonwealth branding but with no organizational role for the Secretariat, said Judah. Judah suggested this would improve attendance at CHOGM, which is often patchy; India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not plan to attend next week’s summit, for example, though there will be a delegation led by External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

“The Indians think this thing is ridiculous and self-harming and just totally bizarre,” said Judah. “They’d be interested in a real investment conference, not this farce.” A second former U.K. government official