Several within Labour Seek Starmer Gone. He Assures Me He Will Survive – while the Economy Is Set to Get Better.

"I'll be positioned in this office by 2027," Starmer declared, adding that if the discussion went well, he might welcome us into his official residence for another talk next year.

For a PM, there's rarely ever break for leaders. Just an hour before we sat down, Starmer had been speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and attempting to work out exactly what had occurred in Venezuela, where his big political chum, US President Donald Trump, had just targeted and seized its leader, Nicolás Maduro.

By the time the discussion, which was much longer than usual, had finished, Maduro had been indicted in New York.

Renewed Energy for the New Year

As the year starts, the Prime Minister seems to have had a kind of a revitalisation. Maybe even just some downtime with loved ones at Chequers, the prime minister's official country residence.

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

But are he and his allies deluding themselves if they believe his political fate are poised to improve?

Leadership Questions

The grisly reality for the leader is that a significant number of his party members are convinced he's not very good at his job. Several of them would sooner gamble and remove him sooner rather than later.

However Starmer was rejecting the idea during our conversation on Saturday morning.

On several occasions he insisted he'd be "evaluated at the next election", maintaining nobody would strip his electoral mandate from him – even if the most effective strategy of stopping Nigel Farage and Reform UK getting to No 10 could be for Labour to change its leader.

"This is the fight of our times and I intend to lead us," 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 across the UK. He attempted to contend, maybe too much, that they are concerning who runs local authorities, and who runs the governments in Holyrood or Cardiff – and unrelated to Westminster.

True – to some extent. But although he may not want 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 resign, should one of his MPs contested his leadership for the job, should those elections be very poor for Labour.

Predicting a Turnaround

He attempted to explain his unpopularity by saying the public was understandably impatient for things to change. He aimed to persuade me, and the nation, that 2026 would be distinct.

The economy would improve notwithstanding rising unemployment, he argued, when policies the administration enacted during their first choppy year began to show results.

• He vowed to close asylum hotels before the current target date of 2029, but he did not set a new date on that.
• He said too, with the proviso that it was not a foregone conclusion, that a peace agreement in Ukraine felt more likely now than at any time since Russia's full-scale invasion.
• He revealed for the first time that Western allies were now talking about how to combine US and European forces to ensure security for Ukraine – to protect a possible peace.

His core message is that this year the country will "reach a turning point".

Political Challenges

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

However, in spite of facing demands from various quarters for a bolder strategy, with increased political direction, more dynamism, more pace and more urgency, his points were well-known ones.

Given that he is in this much political peril, should he consider a new narrative?

No administration, and certainly not one that has been struggling in the polls for many months, gets everything its own way.

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

Regrets and Risks

The prime minister told me that he regretted saying he was "pleased" to welcome back the Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd El Fattah to the UK following an outcry when past remarks he'd previously made – including calls for Zionists and police to be killed – came to light.

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

And he is facing evident political perils as the year progresses. His friendship with the US president takes on 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 many years, the idea he would be at ease with this kind of intervention seems far-fetched.

Policy Stances and Pressures

He told me he was a "lifelong advocate of international law" but the public "simply do not have the full picture at the moment".

Opponents called for him to denounce it prior to the interview. And the government is expected to face more pressure to give an explicit view in Parliament in the near future.

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

The PM rejects he's heading in that direction, but his new more concrete plan to align more closely with the single market – the huge economic European market – will probably provoke howls that he is going back on his pledge never to try to reverse the choices that followed Brexit.

A commitment to cosy up to more of the single market will please a faction on his side of the party, but it is prime ammunition for Reform and the Conservatives to