Rumbles of war are, in hot summer weeks, a nuisance to heads of government.

When Austria's Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 – the event that sparked the First World War – our prime minister, Herbert Asquith, was at home with his brandy bottle in Oxfordshire.

Told of the shooting, he murmured that little would come of the matter and resumed writing love letters to Venetia Stanley.

France's President Poincare was at Longchamp race course. An aide sent Vienna a message of condolence while the president stayed for the last race. Germany's Wilhelm II was at the Kiel sailing regatta. The Kaiser showed more gumption than his counterparts. He yanked on his yacht's tiller, returned to shore and hastened to Berlin.

This strange, arid August we are not yet at such a perilous pass but it might not be long.

Moscow seems to be preparing for war with Nato, increasing its armed presence on borders with Poland and the Baltic states, and has Britain in its sights.

Elsewhere, the ceasefire between Iran and the United States has ended and President Trump's latest contribution to international harmony has been to threaten to 'bomb the s***' out of pro-Western Oman. The Sultan of Oman is Britain's greatest ally in the Gulf.

On the domestic political front, too, tectonic plates are moving. Reform has announced a policy to cut welfare spending by £50billion a year. Yesterday the Conservatives signalled their intention to ditch wilder aspects of Net Zero, saying this could cut the cost of long-term electricity by a third and still leave it 80 per cent clean. Both policies are likely to prove popular.

You would expect any one of these national and international developments to merit an immediate, vigorous response from 10 Downing Street, particularly under a new occupant. PMs are said to be defined by their first days in office. Mr Burnham will, tomorrow, have been prime minister for already a month. Apart from announcing a 'No10 North' has he done anything? Has he crafted a character for himself and his premiership? Has he made the weather, or been blown about like a child's kite?

Burnhamites will aver that the PM has been on 'a tour of the nation', engaged in a whirl of meaningful activity. Along the way he suggested that pubs should pay lower taxes and two days after becoming PM he announced his intention to take rough sleepers off the streets. That second policy will be reannounced today with more specific details.

He agreed, furthermore, that it might be unwise to free PC Harper's killers from prison, even though that is Labour's current policy. The Justice Secretary is struggling to reinterpret the law to satisfy his boss's change of tack.

Mr Burnham has been exceedingly quiet about the small-boats crisis but he did comment on the tragic death of Jason Arday. Nor should we forget that his deputy, Louise Haigh, used the national emergency alert system to tell us not to grill sausages outdoors during the drought. That at least raised a laugh.

To this thrilling list of achievements can be added the fact that our new prime minister yesterday visited… Wolverhampton bus station.

Having previously been a mayor, Mr Burnham is keen on buses. Urban transit provision looms big on mayoral horizons. Some voters do care greatly about such things but should prime ministerial horizons not be wider? Should they not embrace the destination of the kingdom as a whole, rather than Mrs Sprockett's chances of catching the No 53 home in time for her tea?

If the amassing of Russian warheads on Europe's eastern flank is anything to go by, Mrs Sprockett's tea may soon be nuclear-charred. A lurching, unpredictable Moscow seems to be losing its war with Ukraine and is trying to distract attention by picking a fight with the West, particularly Britain.

The Russian embassy has accused us of being an 'accomplice of Ukrainian neo-Nazis' after British-made drones struck Russian military sites, refineries and warehouses. (Fact check: The Ukrainian government is not 'neo-Nazi'. That is simply what the increasingly impatient, and therefore dangerous, Vladimir Putin calls them.)

The drone strikes are said to have caused £35billion worth of damage in Russia. 'London's actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer,' intoned Russia's embassy. 'The deeper its involvement in the conflict and the greater its support for Kyiv's terrorist machinery, the higher the price it will pay.'

A Putin propagandist on Russian state television called for the UK to be hit by some of Russia's Poseidon nuclear torpedoes, which can cause tsunamis.

Putin's gorillas will have thumped their hairy chests at such rhetoric.

Standing in his bus station in Wolverhampton, how did Mr Burnham respond to this monstrous belligerence? He shifted on his feet, pushed his oversize spectacles up his nose and muttered that British policy to Ukraine would remain the same as it had been under Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer.

This was good to hear, so far as it went, but it might have been more convincing had he not been standing in a bus station at the time, an electronic destinations board visible over his right shoulder. With that it was back to his Mayor of Trumpton routine, bustling up to every civic incident to impose his good offices before inviting everyone to the community bandstand for a good old knees-up.

Cue the closing credits of Watch With Mother in the 1960s. Andy may not have the tricorn hat and chain of office but there is a lot of Trumpton's top alderman to him.

One of the charges made against Sir Keir Starmer was that he was too interested in foreign affairs (and foreign travel). In Mr Burnham we may have the opposite.

He is comfortable talking about municipal matters but shies away from anything on the world stage. Is this the result of a shrewd, Maga-style judgment that voters are uninterested in foreign affairs? Or is it driven by lack of experience, even a slight sense of personal inadequacy?

So far he has certainly shown no inclination to say anything interesting about Britain's place in the world, its defence or its strategic imperatives.

He seems in a dither about the most solvable of those imperatives, the future of oil production in the North Sea. There were no rigs in Manchester, you see.

He did have brief contact the other day with someone purporting to be the White House's chief of staff but that turned out to be a hoax. Meanwhile, for his Defence Secretary he chose Wes Streeting, hardly the most martial of personalities. Corporal in the catering corps, at best.

Margaret Thatcher was still leader of the Opposition when, in 1976, the Russians dubbed her 'the Iron Lady'. What will their modern counterparts, and indeed that lunatic in the Kremlin, be making of Andy Burnham?

Not having been reared on TV's Trumpton, they may be unschooled in the limited, unadventurous psyche of the classic British mayor. They may secretly believe there is a great deal more to this parochial waddler than he is letting on.

For all our sakes we must hope they are right.