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"I'll be positioned in this office by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer declared, joking that if our interview went well, he might welcome the interviewer into Number 10 for a follow-up chat in the coming year.

There is never truly downtime for prime ministers. Shortly before we sat down, the PM had been on the phone with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and working to decipher precisely had transpired in Venezuela, where his key political chum, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

By the time the discussion, which was considerably lengthier than usual, had ended, Maduro had been charged in New York.

A Reboot for the New Year

But as the year starts, Starmer seems to have had a kind of a revitalisation. Maybe even just a little relaxation with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat.

This seemed to have left him in a more positive mood than at the sluggish end of 2025, a terrible political year for him.

Yet, are he and his allies deluding themselves if they think his standing are set to get better?

Party Concerns

The harsh truth for the PM is that a significant number of his party members are convinced he's ineffective at his job. Some of them would sooner take a risk and remove him in 2026.

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

On several occasions he insisted he'd be "assessed at the poll", maintaining no one would remove his electoral mandate from him – even if the best chance of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 could be for Labour to change leader.

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

The May Elections

The problem for the PM is that he will be assessed far sooner than then – in a mega set of elections in May throughout the UK. He attempted to protest, maybe too much, that they are about who runs local authorities, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

True – up to a point. But although he may be reluctant to concede it, No 10 will be evaluated by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir stating that there were no scenario under which he would walk away, should a his MPs contested his leadership for the job, should those elections prove very poor for Labour.

Predicting a Turnaround

He attempted to explain his unpopularity by saying the electorate was reasonably anxious for things to improve. He tried to persuade the interviewer, and the nation, that the coming months would be different.

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

• He pledged to close asylum hotels before the current target date of 2029, but he wouldn't put a firm date on that.
• He said too, with the proviso that it wasn't a foregone conclusion, that a settlement in Ukraine felt more likely now than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He disclosed for the first occasion that Western partners were now talking about how to combine US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to guard a possible peace.

His big message is that this year the country will "turn the corner".

A Consistent Script

The PM may have communicated with renewed vitality than I've seen from him for a while – less tense, perhaps, with more time to talk.

But despite encountering pressure from within his own party for a more decisive approach, with much more political direction, more urgency, more pace and more immediacy, his points were familiar ones.

When he finds himself in this much political trouble, should he consider a different script?

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

Sir Keir's challenges are not just because governing is hard, but because he and his colleagues have faltered, even in the last few weeks.

Controversies and Dangers

The prime minister admitted that he was sorry for saying he was "happy" to welcome back 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 – resurfaced.

Sir Keir blamed "procedures" for not catching what the activist had said before – a fancier way of saying not my fault.

And he is facing evident political dangers as the year gets going. 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 former human rights lawyer who opposed the war in Iraq, over his career, the notion he would be at ease with such action seems far-fetched.

Policy Stances and Pressures

He asserted he was a "lifelong proponent of international law" but we "simply lack the complete details at the moment".

Opponents wanted him to criticise the action before the interview. And the government is expected to face further scrutiny to give an definitive view in Parliament in the near future.

And there has consistently been growing desire in the Labour party to reverse or renegotiate some of the results of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's heading in that direction, but his new more concrete commitment to integrate further with the European trading bloc – the huge economic European market – will likely elicit protests that he is breaking his promise never to try to reverse the results that stemmed from Brexit.

A commitment 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