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"I will be positioned in the same seat by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer stated, joking that if our interview was successful, he might welcome the interviewer into his official residence for a follow-up chat next year.

For a PM, there's never any time off for those in the top job. In the hour before we sat down, Sir Keir had been in calls with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and trying to decipher exactly what had transpired in Venezuela, where his big political chum, US President Donald Trump, had recently targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

By the time the discussion, which was far more extended than typical, had finished, Maduro had been formally accused in New York.

A Refresh for the New Year

With the new year begins, Sir Keir appears to have had a degree of a reboot. Maybe even just a bit of a rest with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat.

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

But are he and his supporters kidding themselves if they think his fortunes are poised to improve?

Leadership Questions

The uncomfortable truth for the prime minister is that many of his fellow MPs believe he's underperforming at his job. Some of them would sooner take a risk and remove him sooner rather than later.

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

On several occasions he insisted he'd be "evaluated at the general election", maintaining no one would remove his term from him – despite the fact that the optimal path of halting Nigel Farage and Reform UK reaching No 10 could be for Labour to switch leader.

"This is the struggle of our lifetime and I plan to be at the forefront," he affirmed.

Upcoming Local Votes

The challenge for the PM is that he will be scrutinised long before then – in a mega set of elections in May across the UK. He tried to contend, maybe excessively, that they are concerning who runs councils, and who runs the devolved administrations in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not about Westminster.

Accurate – in part. But even though he may be reluctant to concede it, No 10 will be evaluated by those elections too.

This did not stop Sir Keir stating that there were no circumstances under which he would step down, even if one of his MPs challenged him for the job, if those elections be disastrous for Labour.

Promises of Improvement

He tried to rationalise his unpopularity by saying the public was understandably impatient for things to change. He sought to assure me, and the public, that the coming months would be a change.

The economic situation would recover despite rising unemployment, he claimed, when strategies the administration implemented during their initial rocky year began to take effect.

• He vowed to empty asylum hotels before the current target date of 2029, although he wouldn't put a new date on that.
• He noted too, with the proviso that it wasn't a foregone conclusion, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt a greater possibility now than at any point since Russia's major invasion.
• He stated for the first time that Western allies were now talking about how to combine US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to protect a possible peace.

His central argument is that this year the country will "see an improvement".

Political Challenges

The prime minister may have spoken with renewed vitality than observed from him for a while – calmer, perhaps, with a longer slot to talk.

However, in spite of encountering calls from various quarters for a more decisive approach, with much more political vision, more vigour, more speed and more urgency, his explanations were repeated ones.

Given that he is in such significant political peril, does he need a different script?

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

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

Regrets and Risks

The prime minister told me that he was sorry for saying he was "happy" to see the return of the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK after an backlash when past remarks he'd made in the past – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – came to light.

Sir Keir attributed it to "procedures" for failing to identify what the activist had said before – a fancier way of saying it wasn't his responsibility.

And he is facing evident political risks as the year progresses. His close relationship with the US president acquires a new risk after Trump's intervention on Venezuela.

Based on years of interviewing Sir Keir Starmer, a ex- human rights lawyer who was against the war in Iraq, over many years, the notion he would be content with these events seems far-fetched.

International Law and Brexit

He stated he was a "career-long advocate of international law" but the public "simply do not have the complete details at the moment".

Opponents demanded condemn it before we spoke. 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 bubbling desire in the Labour ranks to reverse or renegotiate some of the outcomes of Brexit.

The PM denies he's heading in that direction, but his new more concrete commitment to align more closely with the EU's single market – the giant economic European market – will likely trigger howls that he is breaking his vow never to try to overturn the decisions that followed Brexit.

A commitment to integrate into more of the single market will satisfy many on his side of the party, but it is prime ammunition for Reform and the Conservatives to