Andy Burnham has had a lucky escape. The new UK Prime Minister believed he was exchanging messages with Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff – only for it to turn out he was communicating with an imposter.

No 10 officials initially contacted the White House directly, afraid Wiles had been targeted by hackers, but otherwise Burnham largely avoided what would have become a serious political headache.

What could have been a diplomatic disaster has turned out to be…fine, not least because Donald Trump himself has shrugged off the incident as a harmless accident, saying it came down to “a miscommunication”. “I spoke to him,” Trump told reporters of Burnham. “We had a good conversation. A couple of them.”

The trouble for Burnham, though, is that sooner or later a confrontation with the real occupants of the White House is coming, and the issues involved in dealing with actual White House personnel might not prove nearly so easy to resolve, even for a prime minister determined to spend more time at home working on domestic issues, and less on the world stage.

The issue with that ambition is that the world has a way of intruding even on domestic issues. Jamieson Greer, the US Trade........

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