Several within Labour Want Keir Starmer Out. The Prime Minister Informs Me He'll Endure – and Britain's Economic Outlook Is Set to Get Better.

"I'll be positioned in this seat by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer stated, joking that if the interview went well, he might welcome the interviewer into Downing Street for a follow-up chat in 2026.

For a PM, there's never truly time off for leaders. Shortly before the interview began, the PM had been in calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and attempting to decipher what on earth had occurred in Venezuela, where his key political chum, US President Donald Trump, had recently attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once our interview, which was considerably lengthier than typical, had ended, Maduro had been charged in New York.

Renewed Energy for the New Year

But as the year starts, the Prime Minister appears to have had a kind of a revitalisation. Maybe even just some a rest with the family at Chequers, the prime minister's rural getaway.

This seemed to have left him in improved morale than at the sluggish tail end of 2025, a terrible political year for him.

Yet, are he and his allies being unrealistic if they believe his standing are set to improve?

Leadership Questions

The uncomfortable reality for the PM is that a significant number of his colleagues believe he's not very good at his job. Several of them would sooner take a risk and remove him sooner rather than later.

But Sir Keir was dismissing such talk in the interview on Saturday morning.

Multiple times he insisted he'd be "evaluated at the next election", arguing nobody would take his five-year mandate from him – even if the best chance of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 might be for Labour to change leader.

"We are in the battle of our generation and I plan to lead us," he declared.

The Spring Test

The challenge for the prime minister is that he will be scrutinised long before then – in a mega set of elections in May across the UK. He tried to argue, perhaps too much, that they are about who runs councils, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not about Westminster.

True – in part. But even though he may not want to admit it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

This did not stop Sir Keir suggesting that there were no circumstances under which he would resign, should a his colleagues ran against him for the job, if those elections prove disastrous for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He tried to rationalise his low poll ratings by saying the electorate was understandably impatient for things to improve. He tried to convince me, and the public, that 2026 would be a change.

The economy would recover in the face of rising unemployment, he said, when policies the government enacted during their initial choppy year began to take effect.

• He pledged to empty asylum hotels ahead of the current target date of 2029, although he wouldn't put a firm date on that.
• He noted too, with the qualification that it wasn't a done deal, that a peace agreement in Ukraine felt more likely now than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He disclosed for the first time that Western partners were now talking about how to integrate US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to guard a possible peace.

His core message is that in 2026 the country will "see an improvement".

Political Challenges

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

But despite facing calls from many directions for a more decisive strategy, with much more political clarity, more dynamism, more speed and more immediacy, his arguments were familiar ones.

When he finds himself in such significant political difficulty, should he consider a change of tack?

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

Sir Keir's problems are not only because governing is hard, but because he and his colleagues have erred, even in the recent past.

Controversies and Dangers

The prime minister admitted that he was sorry for saying he was "delighted" to welcome back the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK following an controversy when comments he'd previously made – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – surfaced.

Sir Keir blamed "procedures" for not catching what the activist had said before – a more diplomatic way of saying it wasn't his responsibility.

And he is facing obvious political dangers as the year progresses. His alliance with the US president takes on a new complication after Trump's intervention 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 far-fetched.

International Law and Brexit

He asserted he was a "lifelong champion of international law" but we "just haven't got the entire story at the moment".

Opponents called for him to condemn it prior to we spoke. And the administration is expected to face more pressure to give an explicit view in Parliament in the coming days.

There has also always been simmering tension in the Labour party to reverse or renegotiate some of the consequences of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's pursuing that, but his new firmer commitment to align more closely with the single market – the giant economic European trading zone – will likely provoke protests that he is going back on his vow never to try to reverse the decisions that followed Brexit.

A commitment to integrate into more of the single market will delight a faction on his own side, but it is prime ammunition for Reform and the Conservatives to