Some within Labour Seek Keir Starmer Gone. He Informs Interviewers He Will Survive – while the Economy Is Set to Get Better.

"I'll remain in this seat by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer remarked, adding that if our conversation was successful, he might welcome us into Number 10 for a follow-up talk in the coming year.

There is never any break for prime ministers. Just an hour before we sat down, the PM had been in calls with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and trying to understand precisely had happened in Venezuela, where his big political chum, US President Donald Trump, had just targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

When the discussion, which was far more extended than usual, had concluded, Maduro had been charged in New York.

Renewed Energy for the New Year

With the year starts, Sir Keir appears to have had a kind of a revitalisation. Perhaps even just some downtime with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat.

This appeared to have left him in better spirits than at the sluggish end of 2025, a awful political year for him.

Yet, are he and his allies kidding themselves if they think his standing are about to improve?

Party Concerns

The harsh reality for the leader is that a significant number of his party members believe he's not very good at his job. Several of them would sooner take a risk and remove him in 2026.

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

Multiple times he insisted he'd be "assessed at the next election", maintaining nobody would strip his term from him – even if the optimal path of halting Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 may be for Labour to replace its leader.

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

The Spring Test

The challenge for the prime minister is that he will be scrutinised well ahead of then – in a major set of elections in May throughout the UK. He sought to protest, maybe too much, that they are concerning who runs local authorities, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

Accurate – up to a point. But although he may be reluctant to acknowledge it, No 10 will be judged by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir suggesting that there were no circumstances under which he would walk away, even if one of his MPs challenged him for the job, if those elections prove very poor for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He attempted to rationalise his low poll ratings by saying the public was naturally impatient for things to improve. He aimed to convince me, and the nation, that this year would be distinct.

The economic situation would improve notwithstanding rising unemployment, he argued, when policies the administration put in place during their first choppy year began to show results.

• He pledged to shut asylum hotels before the current target date of 2029, although he did not set a specific date on that.
• He noted too, with the qualification that it was not a foregone conclusion, that a peace deal in Ukraine felt closer now than at any point since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He stated for the first occasion that Western allies were now considering how to combine US and European forces to provide security for Ukraine – to safeguard a possible peace.

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

A Consistent Script

The PM may have spoken with greater vigour than I've seen from him for a while – more relaxed, perhaps, with a longer slot to talk.

However, in spite of facing pressure from within his own party for a more decisive approach, with much more political direction, more dynamism, more pace and more immediacy, his points were well-known ones.

When he finds himself in this much political peril, does he need a new narrative?

No government, and certainly not one that has been unpopular for an extended period, has everything its as planned.

Sir Keir's problems are not only because government is challenging, but because he and his team have faltered, including in the last few weeks.

Controversies and Dangers

The prime minister told me that he regretted saying he was "happy" to see the return of the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK after an outcry when past remarks he'd made in the past – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – resurfaced.

Starmer blamed "procedures" for failing to identify what the activist had said before – a more diplomatic way of saying it wasn't his responsibility.

And he is facing evident political dangers as the year gets going. His friendship with the US president takes on a new jeopardy after Trump's intervention on Venezuela.

Having interviewed Sir Keir Starmer, a ex- human rights lawyer who opposed the war in Iraq, over his career, the notion he would be content with such action seems unlikely.

International Law and Brexit

He asserted he was a "lifelong proponent of international law" but the public "just do not have the entire story at the moment".

Critics wanted him to denounce it before we spoke. And the administration is likely to face more pressure to give an definitive view in Parliament in the coming days.

And there has long been growing desire in the Labour ranks to revisit some of the results of Brexit.

The PM denies he's doing that, but his new specific plan to align more closely with the EU's single market – the giant economic European trading zone – will likely provoke accusations that he is breaking his vow never to try to overturn the results that followed Brexit.

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