🔗 Share this article

"I'll be sitting in the same position by 2027," the Prime Minister stated, adding that if our discussion went well, he might welcome us into his official residence for another talk next year.

For a PM, there's never truly time off for those in the top job. Just an hour before we sat down, the PM had been on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and trying to decipher precisely had transpired in Venezuela, where his key ally, US President Donald Trump, had recently targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

By the time the discussion, which was much longer than normal, had finished, Maduro had been charged in New York.

A Refresh for the New Year

With the year commences, Sir Keir appears to have had something of a revitalisation. Perhaps even just some a rest with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's official country residence.

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

Yet, are he and his colleagues deluding themselves if they think his standing are set to improve?

Leadership Questions

The grisly truth for the PM is that a significant number of his colleagues believe he's ineffective at his job. Some of them would rather take a risk and remove him this year.

However Sir Keir was dismissing such talk in the interview on Saturday morning.

On several occasions he insisted he'd be "assessed at the poll", maintaining nobody would strip his electoral mandate from him – even if the best chance of halting Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 may be for Labour to change leader.

"This is the struggle 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 scrutinised long before then – in a huge set of elections in May throughout the UK. He sought to contend, maybe too much, that they are about who runs councils, and who runs the devolved administrations in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

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

This did not stop Sir Keir suggesting that there were no scenario under which he would resign, even if one of his MPs ran against him for the job, if those elections be disastrous for Labour.

Predicting a Turnaround

He tried to rationalise his low poll ratings by saying the electorate was understandably eager for things to get better. He sought to convince me, and the nation, that the coming months would be different.

The economy would recover despite rising unemployment, he claimed, when plans the administration put in place during their initial rocky year began to take effect.

• He committed to empty asylum hotels before the current deadline of 2029, but he wouldn't put a specific date on that.
• He said too, with the qualification that it wasn't a done deal, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt a greater possibility now than at any point since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He disclosed for the first occasion that Western partners were now talking about how to integrate US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to safeguard a possible peace.

His central argument is that in 2026 the country will "turn the corner".

Familiar Arguments

The prime minister may have spoken with greater vigour than observed from him for a while – calmer, maybe, with a longer slot to talk.

But despite facing calls from within his own party for a bolder strategy, with increased political direction, more urgency, more speed and more urgency, his explanations were repeated ones.

Given that he is in this much political trouble, is a different approach required a new narrative?

No government, and certainly not one that has been struggling in the polls for many months, gets everything its own way.

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.

Controversies and Dangers

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

Sir Keir blamed "the process" for not realising what the activist had said before – a more diplomatic way of saying it wasn't his responsibility.

And he is facing obvious political risks as the year gets going. His alliance with the US president entails a new risk after Trump's intervention on Venezuela.

Based on years of interviewing Sir Keir Starmer, a ex- human rights lawyer who opposed the war in Iraq, over his career, the thought he would be comfortable with this kind of intervention seems far-fetched.

International Law and Brexit

He stated he was a "career-long champion of international law" but the public "just lack the full picture at the moment".

Critics demanded denounce it before the interview. And the administration is expected to face increased demands to give an explicit view in Parliament in the coming days.

And there has consistently been bubbling desire in the Labour ranks to reverse or renegotiate some of the results of Brexit.

Sir Keir rejects he's pursuing that, but his new more concrete commitment to move closer with the EU's single market – the huge economic European trading zone – will probably provoke protests that he is going back on his pledge never to try to reverse the decisions that followed Brexit.

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