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"I'll remain in this office by 2027," the Prime Minister stated, noting that if our discussion proceeded smoothly, he might invite us into Number 10 for another talk in the coming year.

For a PM, there's never any downtime for prime ministers. In the hour before our chat started, Sir Keir had been speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and attempting to understand exactly what had happened in Venezuela, where his big ally, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once the discussion, which was much longer than normal, had ended, Maduro had been formally accused in New York.

A Refresh for the New Year

With the year commences, Starmer seems to have had a kind of a revitalisation. Perhaps even just some a rest with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

This appeared to have resulted in a more positive mood than at the difficult conclusion of 2025, a terrible year politically for him.

But are he and his supporters deluding themselves if they think his fortunes are about to improve?

Party Concerns

The grisly reality for the leader is that many of his colleagues are convinced he's underperforming at his job. Several of them would rather gamble and oust him this year.

But Starmer was having none of it during our conversation on Saturday morning.

Multiple times he insisted he'd be "assessed at the poll", maintaining no one would strip his electoral mandate from him – despite the fact that the best chance of halting Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 could be for Labour to change its leader.

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

The Spring Test

The issue for the PM is that he will be assessed long before then – in a mega set of elections in May throughout the UK. He sought 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.

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

Despite this, Sir Keir suggesting that there were no situation under which he would resign, even if one of his MPs challenged him for the job, should those elections be catastrophic for Labour.

Promises of Improvement

He attempted to explain his unpopularity by saying the public was naturally impatient for things to get better. He sought to persuade me, and the nation, that the coming months would be a change.

The economy would strengthen in the face of rising unemployment, he argued, when strategies the administration implemented during their first rocky year began to show results.

• He vowed to shut asylum hotels ahead of the current target date of 2029, but he did not set a new date on that.
• He noted too, with the qualification that it was not a foregone conclusion, that a settlement in Ukraine felt more likely now than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He stated for the first time that Western allies were now considering how to coordinate US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to safeguard a potential peace.

His core point is that this year the country will "reach a turning point".

A Consistent Script

The PM may have communicated with greater vigour than I've seen from him for a some time – less tense, maybe, with a longer slot to talk.

However, in spite of encountering demands from many directions for a more decisive strategy, with much more political vision, more vigour, more speed and more immediacy, his points were familiar ones.

Given that he is in such significant political peril, 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 challenges are not only because government is hard, but because he and his colleagues have made mistakes, including in the recent past.

Regrets and Risks

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

Starmer attributed it to "the system" for failing to identify what the activist had said before – a more diplomatic way of saying not my fault.

And he is inviting obvious political risks as the year unfolds. His alliance with the US president entails a new jeopardy after Trump's military action on Venezuela.

Having interviewed Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who was against the war in Iraq, over many years, the thought he would be content with such action seems unlikely.

Policy Stances and Pressures

He told me he was a "career-long advocate of international law" but we "just do not have the complete details at the moment".

Some demanded criticise the action prior to the interview. And the government is expected to face increased demands to give an explicit view in Parliament in the near future.

There has also long been growing pressure in the Labour party to revisit some of the outcomes of Brexit.

The PM rejects he's pursuing that, but his new specific pledge to integrate further with the EU's single market – the huge economic European trading zone – will probably elicit accusations that he is breaking his pledge never to try to reverse the decisions that flowed from Brexit.

A move to integrate into more of the single market will please many on his own side, but it is simple material for Reform and the Conservatives to