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"I'll remain in the same office by 2027," the Prime Minister stated, noting that if the discussion went well, he might welcome us into Number 10 for another conversation next year.

For a PM, there's never truly time off for those in the top job. Just an hour before we sat down, Sir Keir had been speaking with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and attempting to decipher precisely had occurred in Venezuela, where his key political chum, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once our lengthy talk, which was much longer than usual, had finished, Maduro had been indicted in New York.

A Refresh for the New Year

But as the new year begins, Starmer seems to have had a degree of a reboot. Maybe even just a bit of downtime with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat.

This appeared to have resulted in a more positive mood than at the difficult tail end of 2025, a terrible year politically for him.

But are he and his supporters being unrealistic if they believe his standing are about to improve?

Party Concerns

The uncomfortable reality for the leader is that numerous of his colleagues think he's ineffective at his job. A faction of them would rather gamble and get him out in 2026.

But Sir Keir was rejecting the idea in the interview on Saturday morning.

On several occasions he insisted he'd be "assessed at the poll", insisting no one would take his term from him – even if the optimal path of preventing Nigel Farage and Reform UK reaching No 10 might be for Labour to switch leader.

"We are in the fight of our lifetime and I intend to guide the party," he affirmed.

Upcoming Local Votes

The problem for the PM is that he will be assessed well ahead of then – in a huge set of elections in May throughout the UK. He tried to argue, maybe excessively, that they are about who runs councils, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not a verdict on Westminster.

Accurate – to some extent. But even though he may not want to acknowledge it, No 10 will be evaluated by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir implying that there were no circumstances under which he would walk away, should one of his colleagues contested his leadership for the job, if those elections be catastrophic for Labour.

Predicting a Turnaround

He sought to account for his unpopularity by saying the public was reasonably anxious for things to get better. He tried to persuade me, and the public, that 2026 would be different.

The economic situation would recover notwithstanding rising unemployment, he claimed, when strategies the government enacted during their first turbulent year began to take effect.

• He pledged to close asylum hotels ahead of the current deadline of 2029, but he did not put a firm date on that.
• He noted too, with the caveat that it wasn't a foregone conclusion, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt closer now than at any point since Russia's major invasion.
• He stated for the first occasion that Western partners were now talking about how to combine US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to guard a potential peace.

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

Political Challenges

The prime minister may have communicated with renewed vitality than I've seen from him for a while – less tense, perhaps, with a longer slot to talk.

However, in spite of facing demands from within his own party for a bolder approach, with greater political clarity, more urgency, more speed and more urgency, his explanations were well-known ones.

Given that he is in such significant political peril, does he need a new narrative?

No government, and certainly not one that has been unpopular for an extended period, gets everything its as desired.

Sir Keir's problems are not just because governing is difficult, but because he and his team have made mistakes, including in the last few weeks.

Regrets and Risks

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 outcry when statements he'd previously made – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – surfaced.

Sir Keir blamed "procedures" for failing to identify what the activist had said before – a fancier way of saying it wasn't his responsibility.

And he is inviting evident political perils as the year gets going. His alliance with the US president takes on a new jeopardy after Trump's strikes on Venezuela.

Having interviewed Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who opposed the war in Iraq, over his career, the notion he would be at ease with such action seems implausible.

International Law and Brexit

He told me he was a "career-long advocate of international law" but we "simply do not have the entire story at the moment".

Opponents called for him to condemn it prior to we spoke. And the government is likely to face increased demands to give an definitive view in Parliament in the near future.

And there has always been simmering desire in the Labour party to revisit some of the consequences of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's pursuing that, but his new specific commitment to align more closely with the single market – the giant economic European market – will likely elicit accusations that he is reneging on his pledge never to try to undo the choices that stemmed from Brexit.

A commitment to integrate into more of the single market will delight a faction on his side of the party, but it is prime ammunition for Reform and the Conservatives to