🔗 Share this article

"I'll be sitting in the same seat by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer remarked, adding that if the conversation proceeded smoothly, he might invite the interviewer into Downing Street for a follow-up conversation next year.

For a PM, there's never any time off for leaders. Shortly before our chat started, Sir Keir had been in calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and attempting to decipher exactly what had happened in Venezuela, where his close ally, US President Donald Trump, had recently targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

By the time our interview, which was much longer than normal, had concluded, Maduro had been charged in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

With the new year begins, the Prime Minister appears to have had a kind of a refresh. Perhaps even just a bit of relaxation with loved ones at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

This appeared to have resulted in better spirits than at the sluggish end of 2025, a terrible political year for him.

Yet, are he and his supporters deluding themselves if they believe his political fate are about to improve?

Internal Doubts

The uncomfortable truth for the leader is that a significant number of his colleagues believe he's underperforming at his job. A faction of them would rather gamble and remove him this year.

But Starmer was having none of it when we spoke on Saturday morning.

Multiple times he stated he'd be "judged at the poll", insisting nobody would strip his five-year mandate from him – despite the fact that the optimal path of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 could be for Labour to change its leader.

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

The May Elections

The issue for the PM is that he will be judged long before then – in a major set of elections in May across the UK. He sought to contend, maybe too much, that they are concerning who runs councils, and who runs the devolved administrations in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not a verdict on Westminster.

Accurate – in part. But although he may not want to concede it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir implying that there were no situation under which he would step down, even if one of his colleagues challenged him for the job, should those elections prove disastrous for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He attempted to rationalise his unpopularity by saying the voters was reasonably impatient for things to change. He sought to assure me, and the public, that 2026 would be a change.

The economy would recover despite rising unemployment, he claimed, when plans the government enacted during their initial choppy year began to show results.

• He vowed to empty asylum hotels ahead of the current deadline of 2029, but he wouldn't put a new date on that.
• He said too, with the proviso that it was not a foregone conclusion, that a peace deal 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 partners were now discussing how to combine US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to protect a possible peace.

His core argument is that soon the country will "turn the corner".

Familiar Arguments

The PM may have communicated with more energy than observed from him for a some time – less tense, perhaps, with a longer slot to talk.

But despite encountering pressure from within his own party for a more decisive strategy, with increased political direction, more urgency, more speed and more urgency, his explanations were familiar ones.

Given that he is in this much political trouble, is a different approach required a change of tack?

No government, and especially not one that has been unpopular for many months, gets everything its own way.

The Prime Minister's problems are not only because governing is hard, but because he and his colleagues have faltered, even in the last few weeks.

Regrets and Risks

The PM expressed regret that he regretted saying he was "happy" 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 – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – resurfaced.

Sir Keir blamed "the process" for not catching what the activist had said before – a fancier way of saying not my fault.

And he is inviting evident political perils as the year unfolds. His friendship with the US president takes on a new risk after Trump's intervention on Venezuela.

Based on years of interviewing Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who opposed the war in Iraq, over many years, the idea he would be content with these events seems far-fetched.

International Law and Brexit

He told me he was a "lifelong advocate of international law" but we "just lack the complete details at the moment".

Some demanded condemn it prior to the interview. And the government is likely to face more pressure to give an explicit view in Parliament in the coming days.

And there has always been growing pressure in the Labour party to undo or remake some of the outcomes of Brexit.

Sir Keir rejects he's doing that, but his new firmer commitment to move closer with the single market – the huge economic European trading zone – will likely provoke howls that he is breaking his promise never to try to reverse the results that stemmed from Brexit.

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