🔗 Share this article

"I will remain in the same seat by 2027," Starmer declared, noting that if the interview proceeded smoothly, he might welcome the interviewer into Number 10 for a follow-up chat in 2026.

For a PM, there's never any downtime for those in the top job. In the hour before our chat started, the PM had been speaking with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and working to decipher what on earth had happened in Venezuela, where his big ally, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

When the discussion, which was considerably lengthier than usual, had finished, Maduro had been formally accused in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

But as the year starts, Starmer appears to have had a kind of a revitalisation. Maybe even just a little relaxation with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

This seemed to have left him in improved morale than at the difficult conclusion of 2025, a dreadful year politically for him.

Yet, are he and his allies being unrealistic if they believe his standing are set to turn around?

Leadership Questions

The harsh reality for the leader is that many of his colleagues believe he's ineffective at his job. Several of them would sooner gamble and remove him sooner rather than later.

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

On several occasions he insisted he'd be "evaluated at the next election", maintaining nobody would remove his electoral mandate from him – even if the best chance of preventing Nigel Farage and Reform UK reaching No 10 may be for Labour to switch its leader.

"We are in the battle of our generation and I aim to lead us," he said.

Upcoming Local Votes

The issue for the prime minister is that he will be scrutinised well ahead of then – in a major set of elections in May throughout the UK. He sought to argue, maybe excessively, that they are concerning who runs councils, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not about Westminster.

True – to some extent. But although he may be reluctant to admit it, No 10 will be held accountable by those elections too.

This did not stop Sir Keir implying that there were no scenario under which he would resign, even if a his MPs contested his leadership for the job, if those elections prove disastrous for Labour.

Predicting a Turnaround

He sought to explain his unpopularity by saying the public was reasonably impatient for things to get better. He tried to convince me, and the nation, that this year would be different.

The economy would recover in the face of rising unemployment, he claimed, when plans the government enacted during their initial turbulent year began to show results.

• He committed to shut asylum hotels ahead of the current target date of 2029, although he did not put a new date on that.
• He said too, with the qualification that it wasn't a certainty, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt closer now than at any time since Russia's major invasion.
• He disclosed for the first occasion that Western partners were now talking about how to coordinate US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to safeguard a possible peace.

His central argument is that soon the country will "see an improvement".

Political Challenges

The prime minister may have spoken with renewed vitality than I've seen from him for a some time – less tense, perhaps, with more time to talk.

But despite facing calls from many directions for a bolder approach, with greater political clarity, more urgency, more pace and more urgency, his arguments were well-known ones.

When he finds himself in this much political peril, should he consider a different script?

No government, and especially not one that has been struggling in the polls for an extended period, has everything its as planned.

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

Regrets and Risks

The prime minister told me that he was sorry for saying he was "pleased" to welcome back the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK after an controversy when past remarks he'd made in the past – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – surfaced.

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

And he is inviting clear political risks as the year gets going. His close relationship with the US president entails 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 his career, the thought he would be content with such action seems far-fetched.

International Law and Brexit

He asserted he was a "longtime proponent of international law" but the public "simply lack the full picture at the moment".

Opponents wanted him to denounce it prior to the interview. And the government is expected to face increased demands to give an explicit view in Parliament in the next few days.

And there has long been bubbling tension in the Labour ranks to reverse or renegotiate some of the consequences of Brexit.

The PM denies he's pursuing that, but his new more concrete plan to move closer with the single market – the huge economic European market – will likely elicit howls that he is breaking his pledge never to try to overturn the results that stemmed from Brexit.

A decision to align with more of the single market will satisfy some on his side of the party, but it is simple material for Reform and the Conservatives to