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"I'll be sitting in the same position by 2027," the Prime Minister declared, joking that if the conversation was successful, he might invite the interviewer into Number 10 for another talk in 2026.

There is never any downtime for prime ministers. In the hour before the interview began, the PM had been in calls with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and working to understand precisely had happened in Venezuela, where his big political chum, US President Donald Trump, had recently targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once our lengthy talk, which was considerably lengthier than typical, had concluded, Maduro had been formally accused in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

As the year starts, Sir Keir seems to have had a kind of a reboot. Perhaps even just a little relaxation with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

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

Yet, are he and his colleagues being unrealistic if they believe his political fate are set to get better?

Internal Doubts

The harsh truth for the prime minister is that many of his party members are convinced he's underperforming at his job. Some of them would sooner take a risk and remove him this year.

However Sir Keir was having none of it in the interview on Saturday morning.

On several occasions he stated he'd be "assessed at the poll", insisting nobody would take his term from him – despite the fact that the optimal path of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 may be for Labour to switch its leader.

"This is the fight of our lifetime and I intend to guide the party," he declared.

Upcoming Local Votes

The problem for the PM is that he will be judged long before then – in a major set of elections in May across the UK. He tried to protest, maybe excessively, that they are concerning who runs local authorities, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not about Westminster.

Accurate – to some extent. But even though he may be reluctant to admit it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

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

Predicting a Turnaround

He tried to account for his unpopularity by saying the voters was understandably eager for things to change. He aimed to persuade the interviewer, and the nation, that 2026 would be different.

The economy would improve in the face of rising unemployment, he said, when policies the administration put in place during their first rocky year began to bear fruit.

• He pledged to shut asylum hotels ahead of the current deadline of 2029, although he did not set a firm date on that.
• He noted too, with the caveat that it was not a foregone conclusion, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt closer now than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He stated for the first occasion that Western partners were now considering how to integrate US and European forces to offer security for Ukraine – to safeguard a potential peace.

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

A Consistent Script

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

But despite facing demands from various quarters for a bolder approach, with much more political vision, more urgency, more pace and more urgency, his arguments were repeated ones.

Given that he is in considerable political peril, is a different approach required a different script?

No government, and especially not one that has been struggling in the polls for an extended period, has everything its own way.

The Prime Minister's challenges are not just because government is hard, but because he and his team have made mistakes, including in the recent past.

Regrets and Risks

The PM 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 following an backlash when past remarks he'd previously made – such as calls for Zionists and police to be killed – came to light.

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

And he is facing clear political perils as the year gets going. His friendship 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 opposed the war in Iraq, over a long period, the idea he would be content with these events seems far-fetched.

International Law and Brexit

He asserted he was a "lifelong advocate of international law" but the public "just lack the full picture at the moment".

Some demanded condemn it before the interview. And the administration is expected to face increased demands to give an definitive view in Parliament in the coming days.

And there has consistently been bubbling pressure in the Labour party to reverse or renegotiate some of the consequences of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's pursuing that, but his new specific pledge to integrate further with the European trading bloc – the giant economic European trading zone – will probably elicit accusations that he is reneging on his vow never to try to undo the results that stemmed from Brexit.

A commitment to integrate into more of the single market will satisfy a faction on his backbenches, but it is simple material for Reform and the Conservatives to