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"I will be positioned in the same seat by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer declared, joking that if our discussion proceeded smoothly, he might invite the interviewer into Number 10 for another chat in 2026.

For a PM, there's never truly downtime for leaders. In the hour before we sat down, the PM had been in calls with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and working to work out precisely 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 much longer than typical, had concluded, Maduro had been indicted in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

As the year commences, Sir Keir appears to have had a kind of a reboot. Perhaps even just a bit of downtime with loved ones at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

This seemed to have left him in a more positive mood than at the difficult tail end of 2025, a awful year politically for him.

Yet, are he and his allies being unrealistic if they reckon his standing are about to get better?

Party Concerns

The uncomfortable truth for the leader is that many of his fellow MPs believe he's underperforming at his job. Several of them would sooner gamble and remove him this year.

However Sir Keir was rejecting the idea when we spoke on Saturday morning.

Repeatedly he insisted he'd be "judged at the next election", insisting no one would strip his term from him – even if the most effective strategy of preventing Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 might be for Labour to change leader.

"This is the fight of our generation and I intend to guide the party," he said.

The May Elections

The issue for the PM is that he will be scrutinised long before then – in a mega set of elections in May throughout the UK. He tried to protest, perhaps too much, that they are concerning who runs councils, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

True – to some extent. But even though he may not want to concede it, No 10 will be evaluated by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir implying that there were no scenario under which he would resign, even if one of his colleagues ran against him for the job, should those elections be catastrophic for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He tried to account for his unpopularity by saying the voters was reasonably eager for things to change. He tried to convince me, and the public, that the coming months would be different.

The economy would improve despite rising unemployment, he said, when plans the government enacted during their first choppy year began to take effect.

• He vowed to empty asylum hotels ahead of the current deadline of 2029, but he did not set a specific date on that.
• He noted too, with the proviso 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 allies were now considering how to coordinate US and European forces to offer security for Ukraine – to guard a potential peace.

His core message is that in 2026 the country will "reach a turning point".

Familiar Arguments

The prime minister may have communicated with greater vigour than I've seen from him for a while – calmer, maybe, with a longer slot to talk.

However, in spite of facing calls from many directions for a bolder strategy, with much more political direction, more dynamism, more speed and more urgency, his points were well-known ones.

Given that he is in considerable political trouble, should he consider a change of tack?

No administration, and especially not one that has been struggling in the polls for an extended period, gets everything its own way.

The Prime Minister's problems are not just because governing is challenging, but because he and his team have faltered, including in the last few weeks.

Regrets and Risks

The prime minister admitted that he was sorry for saying he was "delighted" 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 "procedures" for not catching what the activist had said before – a fancier way of saying not my fault.

And he is facing obvious political perils as the year gets going. His friendship with the US president entails a new risk after Trump's military action on Venezuela.

Based on years of interviewing Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who was against the war in Iraq, over a long period, the notion he would be comfortable with this kind of intervention seems unlikely.

International Law and Brexit

He told me he was a "career-long advocate of international law" but we "just lack the entire story at the moment".

Some demanded criticise the action 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 consistently been growing desire in the Labour ranks to revisit some of the consequences of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's pursuing that, but his new specific pledge to align more closely with the European trading bloc – the huge economic European market – will probably elicit accusations that he is going back on his promise never to try to overturn the results that followed Brexit.

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