🔗 Share this article

"I'll be positioned in the same seat by 2027," Starmer remarked, adding that if our interview proceeded smoothly, he might welcome the interviewer into his official residence for a follow-up conversation next year.

For a PM, there's never truly downtime for leaders. Just an hour before we sat down, Sir Keir had been speaking with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and trying to decipher exactly what had occurred in Venezuela, where his key political chum, US President Donald Trump, had recently launched a strike against and detained its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

When our interview, which was considerably lengthier than usual, had concluded, Maduro had been charged in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

With the year starts, the Prime Minister appears to have had something of a revitalisation. Maybe even just a bit of a rest with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's official country residence.

That certainly appeared to have left him in improved morale than at the difficult end of 2025, a terrible political year for him.

But are he and his allies deluding themselves if they believe his fortunes are poised to turn around?

Party Concerns

The uncomfortable truth for the prime minister is that a significant number of his fellow MPs believe he's underperforming at his job. Some of them would sooner gamble and oust him this year.

However Starmer was dismissing such talk when we spoke on Saturday morning.

On several occasions he insisted he'd be "evaluated at the poll", insisting nobody would strip his electoral mandate from him – despite the fact that the most effective strategy of preventing Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 could be for Labour to switch its leader.

"We are in the struggle of our generation and I aim to guide the party," he said.

Upcoming Local Votes

The problem for the prime minister is that he will be judged long before then – in a major set of elections in May throughout the UK. He tried to argue, perhaps too much, that they are about who runs local authorities, and who runs the devolved administrations in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

True – up to a point. But even though he may not want to acknowledge it, No 10 will be evaluated by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir suggesting that there were no scenario under which he would step down, even if a his colleagues challenged him for the job, should those elections be catastrophic for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He tried to explain his low poll ratings by saying the public was understandably eager for things to change. He sought to persuade me, and the public, that the coming months would be distinct.

The economy would recover in the face of rising unemployment, he said, when policies the administration put in place during their initial rocky year began to bear fruit.

• He pledged to shut asylum hotels before the current target date of 2029, although he wouldn't put a firm date on that.
• He said too, with the qualification that it wasn't a certainty, that a peace agreement in Ukraine felt closer now than at any point since Russia's comprehensive invasion.
• He stated for the first time that Western partners were now talking about how to coordinate US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to safeguard a possible peace.

His big point is that this year the country will "turn the corner".

Political Challenges

The prime minister may have communicated with renewed vitality than I've seen from him for a some time – more relaxed, maybe, with a longer slot to talk.

But despite facing calls from various quarters for a more decisive strategy, with increased political vision, more urgency, more pace and more urgency, his arguments were well-known ones.

Given that he is in such significant political difficulty, should he consider a change of tack?

No government, and certainly not one that has been struggling in the polls for an extended period, has everything its own way.

The Prime Minister's problems are not just because government is hard, but because he and his colleagues have erred, even in the recent past.

Controversies and Dangers

The prime minister admitted 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 controversy when comments he'd made in the past – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – resurfaced.

Starmer attributed it to "procedures" for not realising what the activist had said before – a fancier way of saying not my fault.

And he is courting obvious political dangers as the year unfolds. His alliance with the US president acquires a new risk after Trump's intervention on Venezuela.

Having interviewed Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who was against the war in Iraq, over a long period, the thought he would be comfortable with these events seems unlikely.

International Law and Brexit

He stated he was a "lifelong champion of international law" but the public "just do not have the entire story at the moment".

Critics demanded condemn it before the interview. And the government is likely to face more pressure to give an clear view in Parliament in the near future.

There has also always been bubbling pressure in the Labour party to revisit some of the results of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's pursuing that, but his new more concrete pledge to integrate further with the European trading bloc – the vast economic European market – will probably provoke accusations that he is breaking his pledge never to try to overturn the choices that flowed from Brexit.

A move to integrate into more of the single market will satisfy a faction on his backbenches, but it is easy fodder for Reform and the Conservatives to