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"I'll be sitting in the same seat by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer remarked, noting that if our discussion was successful, he might welcome the interviewer into Number 10 for a follow-up chat in 2026.

There is rarely ever downtime for leaders. In the hour before the interview began, Starmer had been speaking with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and trying to decipher precisely had happened in Venezuela, where his key ally, US President Donald Trump, had just launched a strike against and detained its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once the discussion, which was much longer than typical, had finished, Maduro had been indicted in New York.

Renewed Energy for the New Year

But as the new year begins, Sir Keir appears to have had a degree of a reboot. Maybe even just a little downtime with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

That certainly appeared to have left him in a more positive mood than at the difficult end of 2025, a awful year politically for him.

Yet, are he and his colleagues deluding themselves if they believe his political fate are about to improve?

Internal Doubts

The grisly reality for the PM is that a significant number of his party members believe he's ineffective at his job. Several of them would sooner gamble and get him out in 2026.

However Starmer was having none of it 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 electoral mandate from him – despite the fact that the best chance of preventing Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 could be for Labour to change its leader.

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

The Spring Test

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

Accurate – to some extent. But although he may be reluctant to admit it, No 10 will be held accountable by those elections too.

This did not stop Sir Keir stating that there were no situation under which he would walk away, should one of his colleagues contested his leadership for the job, should those elections prove catastrophic for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He tried to rationalise his unpopularity by saying the voters was reasonably impatient for things to improve. He aimed to assure me, and the nation, that this year would be different.

The economic situation would improve in the face of rising unemployment, he argued, when policies the administration implemented during their first rocky year began to bear fruit.

• He vowed to shut asylum hotels ahead of the current target date of 2029, although he did not put a firm date on that.
• He noted too, with the qualification that it wasn't a certainty, that a peace agreement in Ukraine felt a greater possibility 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 offer security for Ukraine – to safeguard a possible peace.

His core point 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 some time – less tense, perhaps, with more time to talk.

However, in spite of encountering demands from various quarters for a bolder approach, with increased political vision, more vigour, more speed and more immediacy, his explanations were well-known ones.

Given that he is in this much political difficulty, should he consider a change of tack?

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

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

Regrets and Risks

The PM admitted 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 past remarks he'd made in the past – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – resurfaced.

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

And he is facing evident political dangers as the year progresses. His alliance with the US president acquires a new risk after Trump's strikes on Venezuela.

Based on years of interviewing Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who was against the war in Iraq, over his career, the notion he would be at ease with these events seems implausible.

International Law and Brexit

He stated he was a "longtime advocate of international law" but the public "simply haven't got the entire story at the moment".

Opponents demanded criticise the action before the interview. And the government is likely to face more pressure to give an clear view in Parliament in the next few days.

There has also consistently been bubbling pressure in the Labour ranks to undo or remake some of the outcomes of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's pursuing that, but his new more concrete plan to move closer with the European trading bloc – the vast economic European trading zone – will likely elicit accusations that he is breaking his promise never to try to overturn the decisions that followed Brexit.

A commitment to align with more of the single market will satisfy a faction on his own side, but it is simple material for Reform and the Conservatives to