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Andy Burnham has been prime minister for a little over a week, having taken office on 20 July as the first premier drawn from the north of England since Harold Wilson half a century ago, and his opening period has now widened from domestic retail measures to foreign policy. On Monday he received Volodymyr Zelensky at a British naval base, the first foreign leader hosted since the handover, and London announced it would give Kyiv the intellectual property behind its "Stone Cloak" electronic jammer so that Ukraine can manufacture it at scale — a shift from supplying equipment to licensed production on Ukrainian soil, and the first indication of whether the line on Ukraine inherited from Keir Starmer survives the change of prime minister. The visit is a prelude to Washington: Zelensky is due to meet Donald Trump on Tuesday, 28 July, a day on which Trump is also scheduled to receive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Kremlin has said it is too early to comment on reported US-Ukrainian discussions of an air ceasefire, leaving the diplomatic track around that meeting unconfirmed.
At home the picture is unchanged and still unresolved. The opening package — a restored £2 cap on bus fares, a cut in VAT on household electricity, and a Manchester branch of Downing Street — registered with voters in early polling, but critics on the British right and ministers ousted in the transition call the measures unfunded and gestural, the financing of the VAT cut has been directly challenged, and doubt has been cast on the government's housing target. The Defence Investment Plan remains open and sits with the chancellor who, according to the account of the transition, resigned over it, a dispute inherited rather than closed; that question now runs alongside the commitment made to Kyiv. Domestic energy bills are expected to rise again in the autumn, which would offset the electricity cut and test whether the first week's gains hold once the arithmetic catches up with the announcements.
