LONDON — Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is planning to attend a high-stakes Commonwealth summit hosted by King Charles III, three people with knowledge of the conversations told POLITICO.
While Downing Street has not formally confirmed Burnham will go to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on Nov. 1-4, planning for him to attend has ramped up in recent weeks, said one of the three people. All were granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations.
The biennial summit of 56 countries, most of which once formed part of the British Empire, looks set to be Burnham’s first major diplomatic outing with Charles since entering No. 10 in July. The monarch is the head of the Commonwealth and confirmed last month that he would attend CHOGM.
Some government officials have long suggested that conversations around the U.K. prime minister’s attendance at CHOGM are guided closely by the monarch’s wishes. Burnham and his wife had an audience with King Charles at Balmoral, his Scottish castle, earlier this month.
The king would have good reason to want backup, as the politics of this year’s summit looks destined to be particularly fraught.
It is being held in Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean, many of whose island nations are leading a charge for Britain to pay reparations for its historical role in the slave trade. Last week, Caribbean nations met in Barbados for a conference on reparatory justice.
Calls for reparations dominated the last CHOGM on the Pacific island of Samoa, where Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, insisted the issue was not on the table before other nations confronted him with a communique that mentioned reparations directly.
While U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband is also due to attend CHOGM, one of the three people cited at the start of this article said attending personally would allow the prime minister to “lead from the front” rather than watching the debate unfold in his absence.
However, Downing Street’s line on reparations has changed little since 2024. Burnham’s spokesperson said on Sept. 7 that “the U.K. does not and will not pay reparations,” adding: “The transatlantic slave trade was abhorrent, and of course it’s right that we acknowledge the wrongs of the past, but we’ll continue to face forward and work with other countries on our current shared challenges.”
Estimates of the cost of reparations vary dramatically. Campaigners argue they could take many forms other than financial payments, such as climate adaptation and educational programs.
King Charles told the last CHOGM in 2024 that “None of us can change the past, but we can commit with all our hearts to learning its lessons and to finding creative ways to right inequalities that endure.”
Adding another summit to his formal diary would hand Burnham an even busier schedule this fall, a time when he is already due to unveil a 10-year plan setting out his vision for government. CHOGM will take place days after his first government-wide budget, around a week before the COP31 climate summit in Turkey — which Burnham has confirmed he will attend — and the month before G20 leaders meet in Miami in mid-December.
Burnham, who has sought to cast himself as a leader focused on domestic issues, argued at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday that the cost of living could not be detached from global turmoil. He added: “We sit on the [UN] Security Council. In the Commonwealth … In a divided world, we have the ability to bring people together — and we will. We are going to step into that role.”