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"I'll remain in this position by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer declared, adding that if our conversation went well, he might invite the interviewer into his official residence for another conversation next year.

There is never truly downtime for leaders. Shortly before we sat down, Sir Keir had been speaking with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and trying to understand what on earth had transpired in Venezuela, where his close friend, US President Donald Trump, had just targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

When the discussion, which was considerably lengthier than typical, had ended, Maduro had been charged in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

With the new year begins, the Prime Minister seems to have had a degree of a revitalisation. Perhaps even just a little a rest with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's official country residence.

That certainly seemed to have resulted in a more positive mood than at the sluggish end of 2025, a awful year politically for him.

But are he and his supporters deluding themselves if they believe his standing are about to turn around?

Leadership Questions

The harsh truth for the PM is that many of his party members believe he's ineffective at his job. Several of them would sooner take a risk and remove him in 2026.

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

Multiple times he insisted he'd be "assessed at the poll", insisting nobody would remove his electoral mandate from him – despite the fact that the best chance of halting Nigel Farage and Reform UK reaching No 10 could be for Labour to switch its leader.

"This is the struggle of our generation and I aim to be at the forefront," he declared.

Upcoming Local Votes

The challenge for the prime minister is that he will be judged long before then – in a major set of elections in May throughout the UK. He tried to argue, maybe excessively, that they are concerning who runs local authorities, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not a verdict on Westminster.

Accurate – 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 implying that there were no situation under which he would walk away, should a his MPs ran against him for the job, should those elections prove disastrous for Labour.

Promises of Improvement

He sought to account for his unpopularity by saying the voters was reasonably anxious for things to get better. He sought to persuade the interviewer, and the nation, that 2026 would be distinct.

The economy would improve despite rising unemployment, he argued, when plans the government put in place during their first choppy year began to show results.

• He vowed to shut asylum hotels before the current target date of 2029, although he did not put a firm date on that.
• He noted too, with the caveat that it wasn't a certainty, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt a greater possibility now than at any time since Russia's major invasion.
• He disclosed for the first time that Western partners were now considering how to coordinate US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to safeguard a possible peace.

His core argument is that in 2026 the country will "turn the corner".

Political Challenges

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

However, in spite of facing demands from many directions for a bolder approach, with increased political direction, more urgency, more speed and more immediacy, his points were well-known ones.

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

No administration, and certainly not one that has been unpopular for many months, has everything its as planned.

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

Controversies and Dangers

The prime minister admitted that he was sorry for saying he was "pleased" to see the return of the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK after an controversy when past remarks he'd previously made – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – came to light.

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

And he is facing obvious political risks as the year gets going. His alliance with the US president acquires a new complication after Trump's strikes on Venezuela.

Having interviewed Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who was against the war in Iraq, over his career, the thought he would be content with this kind of intervention seems implausible.

Policy Stances and Pressures

He told me he was a "longtime champion of international law" but we "just lack the full picture at the moment".

Critics called for him to condemn it prior to the interview. And the government is expected to face more pressure to give an explicit view in Parliament in the coming days.

There has also long been simmering tension in the Labour ranks to revisit some of the results of Brexit.

Sir Keir denies he's pursuing that, but his new more concrete pledge to integrate further with the single market – the giant economic European market – will likely provoke protests that he is breaking his promise never to try to overturn the decisions that stemmed from Brexit.

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