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"I will be positioned in this seat by 2027," Starmer remarked, noting that if our conversation was successful, he might invite the interviewer into Number 10 for another conversation in 2026.

There is rarely ever break for prime ministers. Just an hour before we sat down, Sir Keir had been speaking with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and attempting to decipher precisely had occurred in Venezuela, where his close friend, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once our interview, which was considerably lengthier than typical, had ended, Maduro had been charged in New York.

A Refresh for the New Year

As the year starts, the Prime Minister seems to have had a kind of a refresh. Perhaps even just a bit of a rest with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

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

But are he and his colleagues kidding themselves if they believe his standing are poised to turn around?

Internal Doubts

The uncomfortable reality for the leader is that many of his colleagues think he's underperforming at his job. A faction of them would sooner take a risk and remove him this year.

However Sir Keir was rejecting the idea in the interview on Saturday morning.

Multiple times he told me he'd be "judged at the poll", insisting no one would remove his electoral mandate from him – despite the fact that the best chance of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 could be for Labour to replace its leader.

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

The Spring Test

The challenge for the prime minister is that he will be judged long before then – in a mega set of elections in May throughout the UK. He attempted to argue, perhaps too much, that they are concerning who runs councils, and who runs the devolved administrations in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

True – up to a point. But although he may not want to acknowledge it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

This did not stop Sir Keir suggesting that there were no circumstances under which he would walk away, should one of his colleagues challenged him for the job, if those elections prove very poor for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He attempted to rationalise his unpopularity by saying the electorate was reasonably impatient for things to get better. He sought to convince me, and the public, that the coming months would be different.

The economy would recover in the face of rising unemployment, he said, when plans the government implemented during their first choppy year began to bear fruit.

• He pledged to empty asylum hotels before the current deadline of 2029, although he wouldn't put a specific date on that.
• He said too, with the proviso that it wasn't a done deal, that a peace agreement in Ukraine felt more likely now than at any point since Russia's comprehensive invasion.
• He revealed for the first occasion that Western partners were now considering how to coordinate US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to guard a potential peace.

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

Political Challenges

The PM may have spoken with more energy than I've seen from him for a while – calmer, perhaps, with more time to talk.

But despite facing pressure from many directions for a bolder strategy, with greater political direction, more dynamism, more speed and more urgency, his explanations were repeated ones.

Given that he is in such significant political difficulty, should he consider a different script?

No government, and especially not one that has been unpopular for an extended period, gets everything its as planned.

The Prime Minister's problems are not only because government is difficult, but because he and his colleagues have made mistakes, including in the last few weeks.

Controversies and Dangers

The prime minister admitted 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 controversy when statements he'd made in the past – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – surfaced.

Starmer attributed it to "the system" for not realising what the activist had said before – a more diplomatic way of saying it wasn't his responsibility.

And he is facing evident political dangers as the year progresses. His alliance with the US president takes on a new risk after Trump's military action 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 this kind of intervention seems implausible.

Policy Stances and Pressures

He asserted he was a "lifelong proponent of international law" but the public "simply haven't got the entire story at the moment".

Some demanded denounce it before the interview. And the government is likely to face more pressure to give an explicit view in Parliament in the near future.

And there has long been simmering desire in the Labour ranks to revisit some of the outcomes of Brexit.

Sir Keir rejects he's doing that, but his new firmer pledge to move closer with the European trading bloc – the giant economic European market – will likely elicit protests that he is going back on his promise never to try to overturn the choices that followed Brexit.

A commitment to align with more of the single market will please some on his own side, but it is easy fodder for Reform and the Conservatives to