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"I'll remain in this office by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer stated, adding that if the interview was successful, he might invite us into Number 10 for another chat in the coming year.

For a PM, there's rarely ever downtime for leaders. Just an hour before we sat down, the PM had been in calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and working to understand exactly what had occurred in Venezuela, where his key ally, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once our interview, which was far more extended than normal, had finished, Maduro had been charged in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

As the new year begins, Sir Keir appears to have had a kind of a reboot. Maybe even just some a rest with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

This appeared to have resulted in better spirits than at the saggy conclusion of 2025, a dreadful annus horribilis for him.

But are he and his supporters kidding themselves if they reckon his political fate are about to turn around?

Party Concerns

The grisly reality for the leader is that a significant number of his fellow MPs believe he's underperforming at his job. Some of them would sooner gamble and get him out sooner rather than later.

But Starmer was having none of it in the interview on Saturday morning.

On several occasions he stated he'd be "assessed at the next election", maintaining no one would remove his electoral mandate from him – despite the fact that the most effective strategy of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 may be for Labour to replace leader.

"This is the fight of our generation and I aim to lead us," he declared.

Upcoming Local Votes

The challenge for the PM is that he will be judged long before then – in a major set of elections in May throughout the UK. He sought to protest, maybe too much, that they are about who runs councils, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

Accurate – up to a point. But although he may be reluctant to admit it, No 10 will be held accountable by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir implying that there were no situation under which he would walk away, even if one of his MPs ran against him for the job, should those elections be catastrophic for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He sought to rationalise his low poll ratings by saying the public was understandably impatient for things to change. He tried to persuade me, and the nation, that 2026 would be different.

The economic situation would recover in the face of rising unemployment, he claimed, when policies the administration implemented during their first choppy year began to show results.

• He pledged to close asylum hotels ahead of the current target date of 2029, but he wouldn't put a specific date on that.
• He said too, with the qualification that it was not a foregone conclusion, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt more likely now than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He disclosed for the first time that Western partners were now considering how to integrate US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to safeguard a potential peace.

His core message is that soon the country will "see an improvement".

Political Challenges

The prime minister may have communicated with more energy than I've seen from him for a while – less tense, perhaps, with more time to talk.

However, in spite of facing demands from many directions for a bolder approach, with much more political direction, more vigour, more speed and more urgency, his explanations were well-known ones.

Given that he is in such significant political difficulty, is a different approach required a new narrative?

No government, and especially not one that has been unpopular for an extended period, gets everything its own way.

Sir Keir's problems are not only because governing is hard, but because he and his team have erred, including in the recent past.

Controversies and Dangers

The prime minister told me that he regretted saying he was "delighted" to see the return of the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK after an backlash when comments he'd made in the past – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – resurfaced.

Starmer attributed it to "the system" for not catching what the activist had said before – a fancier way of saying it wasn't his responsibility.

And he is facing clear political perils as the year progresses. His alliance with the US president acquires a new complication after Trump's strikes on Venezuela.

Based on years of interviewing Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who opposed the war in Iraq, over many years, the notion he would be content with these events seems unlikely.

Policy Stances and Pressures

He told me he was a "longtime proponent of international law" but the public "simply do not have the entire story at the moment".

Critics wanted him to criticise the action prior to we spoke. And the government is expected to face increased demands to give an explicit view in Parliament in the coming days.

And there has long been bubbling tension in the Labour party to undo or remake some of the outcomes of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's pursuing that, but his new firmer plan to move closer with the EU's single market – the giant economic European trading zone – will probably trigger protests that he is going back on his promise never to try to undo the results that followed Brexit.

A commitment to integrate into more of the single market will satisfy a faction on his own side, but it is simple material for Reform and the Conservatives to