🔗 Share this article

"I'll be sitting in the same seat by 2027," the Prime Minister declared, noting that if our discussion proceeded smoothly, he might welcome us into Downing Street for another talk in 2026.

There is never any downtime for leaders. In the hour before our chat started, Sir Keir had been on the phone with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and trying to understand precisely had occurred in Venezuela, where his big friend, US President Donald Trump, had just targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once the discussion, which was considerably lengthier than typical, had ended, Maduro had been formally accused in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

With the year starts, the Prime Minister appears to have had a kind of a reboot. Perhaps even just some a rest with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat.

This appeared to have left him in improved morale than at the sluggish tail end of 2025, a awful annus horribilis for him.

Yet, are he and his colleagues deluding themselves if they think his fortunes are about to get better?

Leadership Questions

The uncomfortable reality for the prime minister is that numerous of his fellow MPs think he's not very good at his job. Some of them would sooner gamble and oust him this year.

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

On several occasions he told me he'd be "judged at the next election", maintaining nobody would take his term from him – despite the fact that the best chance of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 may be for Labour to switch its leader.

"This is the struggle of our times and I aim to guide the party," he said.

The May Elections

The issue for the PM is that he will be judged well ahead of then – in a huge set of elections in May across the UK. He tried to protest, perhaps excessively, that they are about who runs local authorities, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not about Westminster.

Accurate – up to a point. But although he may not want to acknowledge it, No 10 will be evaluated by those elections too.

This did not stop Sir Keir stating that there were no situation under which he would walk away, even if a his MPs ran against him for the job, if those elections prove very poor for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He sought to explain his low poll ratings by saying the public was understandably impatient for things to change. He sought to assure the interviewer, and the public, that 2026 would be different.

The economic situation would recover in the face of rising unemployment, he argued, when policies the government enacted during their first turbulent year began to take effect.

• He committed to close asylum hotels ahead of the current target date of 2029, although he wouldn't put a specific date on that.
• He added too, with the caveat that it wasn't a foregone conclusion, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt more likely now than at any time since Russia's major invasion.
• He stated for the first time that Western allies were now discussing how to combine US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to guard a potential peace.

His core point is that this year the country will "turn the corner".

Familiar Arguments

The PM may have spoken with renewed vitality than observed from him for a while – more relaxed, maybe, with more time to talk.

But despite encountering pressure from within his own party for a bolder approach, with greater political clarity, more dynamism, more pace and more immediacy, his arguments were well-known ones.

When he finds himself in such significant political trouble, does he need a different script?

No administration, and especially not one that has been unpopular for many months, has everything its own way.

The Prime Minister's problems are not just because governing is challenging, but because he and his colleagues have made mistakes, even in the last few weeks.

Regrets and Risks

The PM expressed regret that he regretted saying he was "delighted" to see the return of the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK following an outcry when statements he'd made in the past – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – surfaced.

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

And he is courting evident political risks as the year progresses. His alliance with the US president takes on a new jeopardy after Trump's military action 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 idea he would be at ease with this kind of intervention seems far-fetched.

International Law and Brexit

He asserted he was a "longtime advocate of international law" but the public "just haven't got the full picture at the moment".

Critics called for him to denounce it before we spoke. And the government is likely to face further scrutiny to give an explicit view in Parliament in the near future.

And there has always been growing tension in the Labour ranks to undo or remake some of the consequences of Brexit.

Sir Keir denies he's pursuing that, but his new firmer plan to align more closely with the single market – the giant economic European market – will likely elicit protests that he is reneging on his pledge never to try to reverse the results that stemmed from Brexit.

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