A Number of in the Labour Party Want Keir Starmer Out. The Prime Minister Assures Interviewers He'll Remain – and the Economy Will Improve.

"I will remain in the same office by 2027," Sir Keir Starmer remarked, adding that if the conversation was successful, he might invite us into Downing Street for another conversation in 2026.

There is rarely ever downtime for prime ministers. Shortly before the interview began, the PM had been in calls with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky and working to decipher precisely had happened in Venezuela, where his close ally, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

Once the discussion, which was far more extended than typical, had concluded, Maduro had been indicted in New York.

Renewed Energy for the New Year

With the year commences, the Prime Minister appears to have had a degree of a reboot. Perhaps even just some downtime with his family at Chequers, the prime minister's country retreat.

That certainly seemed to have resulted in a more positive mood than at the sluggish end of 2025, a awful political year for him.

But are he and his supporters deluding themselves if they reckon his political fate are set to get better?

Leadership Questions

The grisly reality for the PM is that numerous of his fellow MPs are convinced he's underperforming at his job. A faction of them would sooner take a risk and get him out this year.

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

On several occasions he insisted he'd be "judged at the poll", arguing nobody would take his term from him – even if the most effective strategy of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK entering No 10 may be for Labour to switch leader.

"This is the struggle of our times and I plan to guide the party," he affirmed.

The May Elections

The challenge for the PM is that he will be assessed long before then – in a huge set of elections in May across the UK. He sought to argue, maybe too much, that they are about who runs councils, and who runs the devolved administrations in Holyrood or Cardiff – and not about Westminster.

True – in part. But although he may not want to acknowledge it, No 10 will be evaluated by those elections too.

Despite this, Sir Keir implying that there were no situation under which he would step down, even if a his colleagues challenged him for the job, should those elections prove disastrous for Labour.

An Optimistic Outlook

He attempted to explain his unpopularity by saying the public was understandably anxious for things to improve. He aimed to convince the interviewer, and the nation, that this year would be different.

The economic situation would recover notwithstanding rising unemployment, he said, when strategies the administration enacted during their initial rocky year began to bear fruit.

• He vowed to close asylum hotels ahead of the current target date of 2029, but he did not set a new date on that.
• He noted too, with the caveat that it wasn't a certainty, that a peace agreement in Ukraine felt closer now than at any time since Russia's major invasion.
• He revealed 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 potential peace.

His big argument is that soon the country will "reach a turning point".

A Consistent Script

The PM may have spoken with renewed vitality than observed from him for a while – more relaxed, perhaps, with a longer slot to talk.

However, in spite of facing pressure from many directions for a more decisive strategy, with greater political direction, more urgency, more pace and more immediacy, his arguments were repeated ones.

When he finds himself in this much political difficulty, does he need a different script?

No administration, and especially not one that has been struggling in the polls for many months, has everything its as planned.

The Prime Minister's challenges are not only because government is hard, but because he and his colleagues have erred, including in the last few weeks.

Controversies and Dangers

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 statements he'd made in the past – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – resurfaced.

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

And he is courting clear political perils as the year progresses. His friendship with the US president acquires a new risk after Trump's strikes on Venezuela.

Having interviewed Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer who was against the war in Iraq, over his career, the thought he would be at ease with such action seems unlikely.

International Law and Brexit

He stated he was a "career-long proponent of international law" but we "simply do not have the entire story at the moment".

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

There has also always been growing pressure in the Labour party to revisit some of the results of Brexit.

The PM disputes he's pursuing that, but his new more concrete plan to integrate further with the European trading bloc – the vast economic European trading zone – will probably elicit howls that he is going back on his vow never to try to overturn the results that flowed from Brexit.

A commitment to cosy up to more of the single market will delight some on his own side, but it is simple material for Reform and the Conservatives to