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"I will be positioned in this office by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer stated, adding that if our conversation went well, he might welcome the interviewer into Number 10 for a follow-up talk in 2026.

There is never any break for those in the top job. Shortly before the interview began, Starmer had been speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and working to work out what on earth had transpired in Venezuela, where his big political chum, US President Donald Trump, had recently launched a strike against and detained its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

When our lengthy talk, which was much longer than normal, had finished, Maduro had been indicted in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

As the year commences, the Prime Minister appears to have had something of a reboot. Maybe even just a bit of a rest with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

This appeared to have put him in a more positive mood than at the sluggish conclusion of 2025, a terrible annus horribilis for him.

But are he and his allies deluding themselves if they reckon his fortunes are about to improve?

Internal Doubts

The grisly reality for the leader is that a significant number of his party members are convinced he's ineffective at his job. Several of them would rather gamble and remove him sooner rather than later.

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

Multiple times he insisted he'd be "judged at the general election", arguing no one would remove his five-year mandate from him – even if the optimal path of halting Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 might be for Labour to switch leader.

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

Upcoming Local Votes

The challenge for the prime minister is that he will be assessed well ahead of then – in a major set of elections in May across the UK. He tried to contend, perhaps too much, that they are concerning who runs councils, and who runs the devolved administrations in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not about Westminster.

True – to some extent. But although he may be reluctant to concede it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir implying that there were no scenario under which he would step down, even if a his MPs challenged him for the job, should those elections be very poor for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He sought to account for his unpopularity by saying the voters was understandably impatient for things to change. He sought to persuade the interviewer, and the nation, that this year would be a change.

The economy would strengthen despite rising unemployment, he said, when strategies the government enacted during their initial rocky year began to show results.

• He pledged to empty asylum hotels before the current deadline of 2029, although he did not put a specific date on that.
• He noted too, with the caveat that it was not a foregone conclusion, that a settlement in Ukraine felt a greater possibility now than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He stated for the first occasion that Western allies were now considering how to combine US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to safeguard a potential peace.

His core argument is that in 2026 the country will "see an improvement".

Familiar Arguments

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

But despite encountering demands from many directions for a bolder strategy, with much more political clarity, more dynamism, more speed and more immediacy, his explanations were repeated ones.

Given that he is in considerable political peril, does he need a change of tack?

No government, and certainly not one that has been struggling in the polls for an extended period, gets everything its as planned.

Sir Keir's challenges are not only because government is hard, but because he and his team have faltered, including in the recent past.

Regrets and Risks

The prime minister admitted that he regretted saying he was "pleased" to welcome back the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK after an backlash when comments he'd previously made – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – came to light.

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

And he is facing obvious political dangers as the year gets going. His friendship with the US president takes on a new jeopardy after Trump's strikes on Venezuela.

Based on years of interviewing Sir Keir Starmer, a ex- human rights lawyer who opposed the war in Iraq, over many years, the notion he would be at ease with this kind of intervention seems implausible.

International Law and Brexit

He asserted he was a "career-long champion of international law" but the public "simply haven't got the complete details at the moment".

Some called for him to denounce it before the interview. And the government is likely to face increased demands to give an definitive view in Parliament in the coming days.

There has also consistently been simmering desire in the Labour party to revisit some of the results of Brexit.

The PM denies he's heading in that direction, but his new specific commitment to integrate further with the European trading bloc – the vast economic European trading zone – will probably provoke howls that he is breaking his pledge never to try to overturn the results that followed Brexit.

A commitment to cosy up to more of the single market will satisfy many on his backbenches, but it is prime ammunition for Reform and the Conservatives to