“I think the first couple of weeks of Andy will be very exciting,” O’Neill said. “Let’s see. As I often say to his gang, once you put your hand up, you’ve got to want to do this.”
Burnham has got a “very good antenna,” O’Neill added. “He’s very street savvy. Quite often people in Whitehall and Westminster sort of live in their own little cloud. And Andy can handle the streets and that in itself is really important.”
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O’Neill, whose new BRICS+ Thinking platform aims to bring together economic and trade expertise, called for greater engagement between the U.K. and the emerging economies, claiming the U.K. has “failed to listen to them in the decade since the country voted to leave the European Union.”
During the Makerfield by-election campaign, Burnham ruled out the option of the rejoining the EU, despite saying last September that he would like to see a return to the bloc in his lifetime. O’Neill however revealed that would support re-joining under the right conditions.
“Yes, I would [support re-joining], but I think it is very important that some leader in this country finally wakes up and does something serious about the deeper issues that affected so many people that wanted to blame something for them not sharing in prosperity for the past 30, 40 years.” But he cautioned that the “conditions needed to be right” for rapprochement with the EU.
The Starmer government expended vast effort to strengthen ties with the EU. O’Neill described his own position as a “modest Remainer because I thought it was a crazy decision to leave economically, but I did think the shock of such a decision might wake us up on both important domestic issues and that the UK might really boldly lead a path…of getting real,” he argues.
Anne McElvoy’s interview with Jim O’Neill will feature on this morning’s edition of the Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast.