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"I'll remain in this seat by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer stated, joking that if the interview was successful, he might welcome the interviewer into Downing Street for a follow-up talk in the coming year.

For a PM, there's never any downtime for leaders. Just an hour before our chat started, Starmer had been in calls with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and working to decipher exactly what had happened in Venezuela, where his close political chum, US President Donald Trump, had recently launched a strike against and detained its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

By the time our lengthy talk, which was considerably lengthier than typical, had concluded, Maduro had been indicted in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

But as the year starts, the Prime Minister appears to have had a degree of a reboot. Maybe even just a little a rest with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat.

This appeared to have put him in improved morale than at the difficult conclusion of 2025, a awful annus horribilis for him.

Yet, are he and his colleagues kidding themselves if they think his standing are about to turn around?

Party Concerns

The harsh truth for the leader is that a significant number of his colleagues believe he's not very good at his job. A faction of them would sooner gamble and oust him this year.

However Starmer was dismissing such talk during our conversation on Saturday morning.

On several occasions he stated he'd be "judged at the poll", arguing nobody would take his electoral mandate from him – even if the most effective strategy of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 may be for Labour to change leader.

"We are in the struggle of our times and I plan to lead us," he affirmed.

Upcoming Local Votes

The challenge for the prime minister is that he will be assessed far sooner than then – in a mega set of elections in May across the UK. He sought to protest, perhaps too much, that they are concerning who runs local authorities, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

Accurate – to some extent. But although he may not want to admit it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

This did not stop Sir Keir stating that there were no situation under which he would walk away, should one of his colleagues contested his leadership for the job, if those elections be catastrophic for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He sought to explain his unpopularity by saying the electorate was reasonably anxious for things to change. He aimed to persuade me, and the public, that 2026 would be different.

The economy would recover despite rising unemployment, he said, when policies the government put in place during their initial turbulent year began to bear fruit.

• He committed to close asylum hotels before the current target date of 2029, but he did not set a new date on that.
• He added too, with the caveat that it wasn't a foregone conclusion, that a settlement in Ukraine felt a greater possibility now than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He revealed for the first time that Western allies were now considering how to combine US and European forces to offer security for Ukraine – to guard a potential peace.

His core point is that in 2026 the country will "turn the corner".

Familiar Arguments

The PM may have communicated with renewed vitality than I've seen from him for a some time – less tense, maybe, with more time to talk.

However, in spite of encountering calls from many directions for a bolder strategy, with increased political vision, more urgency, more speed and more urgency, his arguments were familiar ones.

When he finds himself in considerable political peril, is a different approach required a different script?

No administration, and certainly not one that has been unpopular for many months, has everything its own way.

The Prime Minister's challenges are not only because governing is hard, but because he and his colleagues have made mistakes, even in the recent past.

Regrets and Risks

The PM expressed regret that he regretted saying he was "happy" to welcome back the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK after an controversy when past remarks he'd previously made – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – surfaced.

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

And he is courting clear political perils as the year unfolds. His close relationship with the US president entails a new complication after Trump's intervention on Venezuela.

Having interviewed Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who was against the war in Iraq, over his career, the notion he would be comfortable with such action seems unlikely.

Policy Stances and Pressures

He stated he was a "career-long advocate of international law" but we "simply haven't got the complete details at the moment".

Opponents called for him to criticise the action prior to the interview. And the administration is expected to face increased demands to give an explicit view in Parliament in the next few days.

There has also long been simmering pressure in the Labour party to revisit some of the consequences of Brexit.

The PM denies he's heading in that direction, but his new more concrete commitment to move closer with the EU's single market – the huge economic European trading zone – will likely provoke howls that he is reneging on his promise never to try to overturn the decisions that flowed from Brexit.

A decision to cosy up to more of the single market will delight a faction on his side of the party, but it is simple material for Reform and the Conservatives to