Be it Andy Burnham or Chinese President Xi Jinping, the prime minister was being extremely careful with his language on both the home and international front as he made his way over to Beijing for a five-day tour of China and Japan.
When it came to the Chinese president, Sir Keir Starmer was a leader who knew that difficult conversations lay ahead but was at pains not to pre-empt any of that ahead of the first bilateral meeting in China between a UK prime minister and Chinese president in eight years.
So when it came to questions about raising human rights issues – specifically the plight of the Uyghurs and the imprisonment of British pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai – with the Chinese leader, Starmer said on both matters he was “not going to get ahead of himself”.
He said only that there were concerns the government had raised in a number of ways, and told us he would give a readout once those meetings were had.
Read more from Sky News: Who is Jimmy Lai?
It was the same on the matter of Ukraine, as the prime minister was pressed on whether he would ask Xi to put pressure on Vladimir Putin to end the war.
“In relation to what I’ll raise on this visit, obviously, I’m not going to get ahead of myself,” he said.
“You know my practice, which is to raise issues that need to be raised.
“But I’m not going to go into specific sensitive issues on the way out.”
Burnham ‘doing an excellent job’
As for the Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham – well, the prime minister was as circumspect on that as he was when it came to the matter of dealing with the Chinese.
Sir Keir insisted Burnham hadn’t been told in advance that he…
