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"I'll be positioned in the same position by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer stated, adding that if the discussion was successful, he might welcome the interviewer into Number 10 for another chat in the coming year.

For a PM, there's rarely ever break for those in the top job. Shortly before our chat started, Starmer had been speaking with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and working to decipher what on earth had occurred in Venezuela, where his big political chum, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once our lengthy talk, which was considerably lengthier than usual, had concluded, Maduro had been charged in New York.

A Refresh for the New Year

But as the new year begins, the Prime Minister appears to have had a degree of a revitalisation. Perhaps even just a little relaxation with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's official country residence.

This appeared to have left him in better spirits than at the sluggish tail end of 2025, a dreadful annus horribilis for him.

But are he and his supporters deluding themselves if they reckon his standing are set to turn around?

Leadership Questions

The grisly reality for the leader is that many of his colleagues believe he's underperforming at his job. Some of them would rather take a risk and remove him this year.

But Sir Keir was having none of it in the interview on Saturday morning.

Repeatedly he insisted he'd be "judged at the poll", maintaining no one would remove his five-year mandate from him – despite the fact that the optimal path of preventing Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 could be for Labour to switch leader.

"We are in the fight of our lifetime and I aim to be at the forefront," he declared.

The May Elections

The challenge for the prime minister is that he will be judged well ahead of then – in a mega set of elections in May throughout the UK. He sought to contend, maybe too much, that they are about 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 acknowledge it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

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

Predicting a Turnaround

He tried to account for his unpopularity by saying the electorate was naturally impatient for things to improve. He tried to persuade the interviewer, and the public, that the coming months would be a change.

The economy would improve notwithstanding rising unemployment, he argued, when strategies the administration enacted during their initial turbulent year began to take effect.

• He vowed to shut asylum hotels ahead of the current deadline of 2029, although he wouldn't put a firm date on that.
• He said too, with the proviso that it was not 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 occasion that Western partners were now discussing how to coordinate US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to safeguard a potential peace.

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

Familiar Arguments

The prime minister may have communicated with renewed vitality than observed from him for a some time – calmer, maybe, with more time to talk.

But despite facing pressure from within his own party for a more decisive strategy, with increased political direction, more vigour, more speed and more immediacy, his explanations were well-known ones.

When he finds himself in such significant political peril, does he need a new narrative?

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

Sir Keir's problems are not only because governing is difficult, but because he and his team have erred, even in the last few weeks.

Controversies and Dangers

The prime minister 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 following an outcry when comments he'd made in the past – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – came to light.

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

And he is inviting evident political perils as the year progresses. His friendship with the US president takes on a new jeopardy 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 his career, the idea he would be content with these events seems implausible.

International Law and Brexit

He told me he was a "lifelong advocate of international law" but we "simply lack the full picture at the moment".

Opponents wanted him to denounce it before the interview. And the administration is likely to face further scrutiny to give an explicit view in Parliament in the next few days.

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

Sir Keir rejects he's heading in that direction, but his new firmer pledge to move closer with the single market – the huge economic European trading zone – will likely trigger protests that he is reneging on his pledge never to try to undo the choices that flowed from Brexit.

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