“I’ll be sitting in this seat by 2027,” Sir Keir Starmer told me, cracking a gag that if our conversation went well he would invite us into Downing Street to talk to us next year too.<\/p>\n
There is never truly time off for prime ministers. In the hour before we sat down to speak, Sir Keir had been on the phone to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, and trying to work out what on earth had happened in Venezuela where his big political chum, US President Donald Trump, had just attacked and captured its leader<\/a>, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro.<\/p>\n By the time our interview, which was much longer than normal, had finished, Maduro had been charged in New York.<\/p>\n But as the year starts, Sir Keir seems to have had something of a refresh, a reboot. Maybe even just a bit of a rest with the family at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat. <\/p>\n That certainly appeared to have left him in better spirits than at the saggy end of 2025, a dreadful political year for him.<\/p>\n But are he and his allies kidding themselves if they reckon his fortunes are about to improve?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I’ll be sitting in this seat by 2027,” Sir Keir Starmer told me, cracking a gag that if…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-351620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}