Angela Rayner has told Keir Starmer to “change now” as the prime minister faces the prospect of a leadership challenge within the next 24 hours.

In her first public comments since Labour’s catastrophic performance in last Thursday’s elections, Rayner also threw her weight behind Andy Burnham’s attempt to become an MP again.

She said: “What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change. This may be our last chance.”

Rayner, who was forced to resign last September over a tax scandal, condemned Starmer’s handling of the Peter Mandelson row, which she said “showed a toxic culture of cronyism” in the party.

She also said it had been “a mistake” to block Burnham from standing in February’s by-election in Gorton and Denton, which saw Labour lose to the Greens.

Rayner said the Greater Manchester mayor should be allowed to return to Westminster.

“This is bigger than personalities, but it is time to acknowledge that blocking Andy Burnham was a mistake,” she said.

“We must show we understand the scale of change the moment calls for – that means bringing our best players into parliament – and embracing the type of agenda that has been successful at a local level, rather than reaching back to an agenda and politics that has failed people.

“These are the fights we need to have, and the change in direction we need to see. Policy tweaks will not fix the fundamental challenges facing our country.

“This government needs, at pace, to put measures in place that make people’s lives tangibly better, while fixing the foundations of a system rigged against them.

“The prime minister must now meet the moment and set out the change our country needs.

“Change our economic agenda to prioritise making people better off, change how we run our party so that all voices are listened to, and change how we do politics.

“Labour exists to make working people better off. That is not happening fast enough, and it needs to change — now.”

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Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice is facing a mounting backlash after he failed to condemn one of the party’s new councillors who said Nigerans should be melted down to fill potholes”.

Tice was asked repeatedly in a series of interviews to disown the remarks by Glenn Gibbins, who was elected in the Hylton Castle ward in Sunderland in Thursday council elections.

In a post on social media in 2024, he said: “Can’t believe amount of Nigerians in town … should melt them all down and fill in the potholes.”

Reform has launched an investigation into Gibbins, but Tice dismissed the criticism of him as “smearing and sneering”.

On the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Tice said: “I’m going later to a campaign against the scourge of anti-semitism, which is the greatest threat facing us, particularly in London but elsewhere across the UK. That’s what people are really concerned about. If people have said daft things, of course it’ll be looked at.”

Pressed on Gibbins’ remarks, he said: “Laura, this weekend we are celebrating our incredible successes. Like any party, you have internal processes to look at where people have said or done the wrong thing.”

Asked if he condemned them, Tice said: “I condemn anything that is wrong or inappropriate.”

But when asked if he condemned the councillor’s specific comments, he dodged the question and said: “The key thing is voters have heard all of this smearing and this sneering against all of us and they voted for more Reform because they want action, they want delivery. They’re sick of the failures of the Tories and Labour.”

A Labour spokesman said: “It’s utterly grotesque that Reform can’t even call out clear racism.

“It speaks volumes that Richard Tice tried to brush off these comments. And it speaks volumes that Nigel Farage refused to sack him as a candidate and is now happy to have him represent Reform as a councillor. They’re both a disgrace.

“Labour is the only party that will stand up to the division of Reform.”

Tice also faced a mounting backlash on social media, including from London mayor Sadiq Khan.

Subscribe to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.

Dreading the return to work after a relaxing weekend is so common it has a name: the Sunday scaries.

And even if it’s not the start of a new working week, feeling less-than-delighted to head to work in the morning isn’t exactly uncommon.

But according to Jackson Parsons, work culture expert and founder of the Duvet Flip, sometimes it can be a red flag.

He explained: “There’s a huge difference between feeling physically tired and emotionally resistant to the life you’re waking up to. Many people mistake burnout, disengagement or emotional exhaustion for laziness because the symptoms often show up first thing in the morning.”

Here, he shared seven signs to look out for:

This, the expert said, might be a sign your body associates your workplace with stress.

“This is very overlooked as people only think anxiety matters once it becomes extreme such as having a breakdown. But low-level dread every morning is still your body sending a warning,” he shared.

“Whether it’s checking job sites during lunch, imagining moving abroad or fantasising about quitting dramatically, escapism usually reveals emotional dissatisfaction early on,” Parsons said.

“Most people don’t daydream about disappearing from their own life if they feel genuinely fulfilled in it. It doesn’t always mean you need to quit immediately, but it often means something important isn’t being met anymore.”

Parsons said our bodies are pretty good at telling us what we need, if only we can bring ourselves to listen. And part of that communication system can involve fatigue.

“A major sign your exhaustion is emotional rather than physical is when your energy suddenly returns outside work. If you feel more alive on weekends or holidays, that’s useful information,” he said.

A healthy workplace will leave you resilient. But when your job isn’t quite right, replying to emails begins to feel impossible, small requests irritate you, and meetings feel exhausting before they’ve even started, the expert said,

“This often happens when people lose emotional connection to their work.”

If you spent a long time working up to your career, you might feel guilty for hating it now. “A lot of people stay stuck because they feel guilty. Careers often become tied to identity, making dissatisfaction emotionally hard to admit,” Parsons said.

But if a role isn’t right for you, that’s OK; honesty is the first step.

It’s rare that your “weekend drinks” self is the same as your “replying to emails” self. Still, Parsons told us, if you feel much lighter out of work than you do in it, that might be worth paying attention to.

“Some become quieter, more annoyed, or emotionally flat without even knowing it. When your work environment consistently pulls you away from who you naturally are, your mornings start feeling heavier as your brain already knows it’s about to enter survival mode again.”

“One of the most damaging things people do is mistake emotional exhaustion for personal failure. People can be incredibly harsh on themselves. They’ll call themselves lazy or unmotivated instead of asking whether their environment is actually healthy for them anymore,” the work culture expert said.

“Overworking has become so normalised that people ignore warning signs for far too long. We live in a culture where exhaustion is almost treated like a personality trait now.”

Parsons recommended the following steps:

• Stop checking work off the clock. Giving yourself 20 minutes before checking work can help to create healthier boundaries, he said, and avoid late-night email refreshes if you can.
• Get specific about your feelings. “Many people call it ‘work stress’ without identifying the real issues behind it. Targeting whether it is from workload, lack of purpose, burnout or poor management makes the feeling easier to address,” he added.
• Create one part of the day that feels yours. Something as small as a workout can keep you grounded. “You need a moment in your day that reminds you you’re a person, before you’re an employee.”
• Stop normalising exhaustion. “Many people treat burnout like a normal part of success. Constant exhaustion shouldn’t feel like a personality trait or something you simply just have to ‘deal’ with.”
• Get real about what needs to change. Whether that’s better boundaries, more rest or admitting you’ve outgrown your current role.

Today I am volunteering at an outpatient addiction treatment clinic in Baltimore, in what my Uber driver warns me is “a very dangerous neighbourhood”.

It’s a cold Saturday morning in February, and I’ve travelled about an hour from Washington, D.C., where I live. I’m here to share some business management methods and operational tools with the team, based on a class I teach at Georgetown and my job as a management consultant.

The driver drops me off in the parking lot, and as I walk toward the entrance, I see an armed guard at the door. I walk past him into a large open waiting room, which is bright and clean. The right wall is lined with staff sitting behind glass partitions like bank tellers, but big, heavy-looking curtains hang from the ceiling at each window.

I check in and have a seat against the back wall. I try not to stare, but I’m curious about the curtains. I look around at patients coming and going.

A young woman enters the clinic and has the skinniest legs I’ve ever seen, like two drawing pencils in colourful, patterned leggings. She rushes down a hallway like she’s late for something, and I wonder where she’s going.

Most are men in dark, battered jackets that don’t look very warm, with their hoods up and heads down. No one makes eye contact with me. I am suddenly aware of my warm, beige cashmere coat and Stella McCartney bag, and I feel ashamed and ridiculous that I wore these things (that I even have these things). Still, my unconscious bias makes me feel my family’s story is somehow different from those in this waiting room.

As I’m waiting for my friend, the doctor who runs the clinic, I think about why I’m here: In 2017, my youngest sister, Jenny, died from liver failure due to prolonged use of prescription opioids and alcohol; she was a 44-year-old suburban mother.

Since she died, I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about the opioid crisis and be part of the solution – or, more selfishly, maybe I’m just here to do penance for my role in her death.

I experienced the entirety of my sister’s struggle and death in just six gruesome days at Kenmore Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, New York. That week, my sister Colleen and I stayed in Jenny’s hospital room every night. All day and night, Jenny moaned for Dilaudid, a synthetic opioid she’d previously been prescribed.

For the first three days, I held Jenny’s hand a lot and touched her hair. I don’t think I’d ever touched my sister’s hair before, but now I feel it all the time on my right hand. I put drops in her eyes, rubbed her swollen feet and fed her Ensure. She was in and out of consciousness but never lucid enough to talk with us coherently.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a conversation with her. When was the last time I’d told her I loved her?

When I think about that week, I only remember a series of degrading and horrific incidents, one worse than the next: the first time I saw my sister’s severely jaundiced skin and light green eyes that were covered with bubbles, as a result of liver failure; shuffling Jenny to the bathroom all night long; my mother signing “Do Not Resuscitate” forms; full bags of bloody fluid hanging from Jenny’s bed; and, finally, her death.

I watched my sister die with my parents on either side of her hospital bed, a picture I’ll never be able to unsee. No wake. No funeral. Her estranged husband stole her body from the hospital, without our consent, and left her ashes in a funeral home a few days later, unwilling to pay the bill.

I was on a plane back to Washington, D.C., the day after she died, shocked that I was no longer the oldest of three sisters – just the older of two.

The bone-crunching grief of this experience was compounded by the stigma that gets unfairly associated with certain types of death: suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, mental illness. You see it in euphemistic obituaries with vague explanations like “passed away unexpectedly” or “died after a long struggle,” descriptions that do a disservice to both the living and the dead.

My coping mechanism has always been reading, and there are tons of materials about grieving the death of a parent, spouse, child – even pets! But I found only one book, Surviving the Death of a Sibling, by T.J. Wray, who lost her 43-year-old brother, that captured exactly how I felt on that flight back to D.C.

Wray wrote: “The year my brother died I stopped breathing, but no one noticed.”

Our siblings are with us at the beginning of our lives, and most of us take for granted they will be there as we approach the end. Yet surviving adult siblings are often forgotten mourners; the focus of grief is usually on parents, spouses and children. As a surviving adult sibling, I am the lowest member in the hierarchy of sorrow – well below my parents and Jenny’s two children.

I’ve only recently learned about the psychology of this type of bereavement, called “disenfranchised grief”. It is not openly acknowledged, socially mourned or publicly supported. Immediately following her death, when people asked if I had siblings, I wanted to answer, “I have two sisters. Colleen is great. Her youngest just graduated from college. And … well … Jenny’s dead.” But I never did.

Volunteering and trying to be an advocate have become my version of grieving. I’ve shared our family’s story (at least the parts I know about) as honestly as I can. I’ve written opinion pieces and talked about my mistakes on national television.

I’ve tried to learn about addiction, more accurately referred to as “substance use disorder (SUD),” to understand how our family never realised Jenny had this issue, never had an honest conversation about what was happening to her.

Instead, we rationalised away the warning signs and accepted her increasingly threadbare explanations for them, ultimately enabling her. Jenny didn’t do a single stint in rehab or have any interventions. I’m not ashamed of my sister for struggling with drugs and alcohol, but I’m so ashamed of myself for not being educated about it sooner.

In the years since my sister’s death, my swells of grief are usually triggered by childhood memories. For many summers while my two sisters and I were in grammar school, my parents would take us camping in Chautauqua County, New York. Colleen, Jenny and I would build forts, catch fireflies, try to catch sunfish and collect kindling for campfires. But our favourite activity was putting on shows at “the spider,” a metal jungle gym that looked like a gigantic tarantula.

We spent hours planning routines and practicing. Even though Jenny was the youngest and only about four or five years old, she was fearless, doing all the difficult flips with me on the high bars. On “show nights,” my parents would walk down to the spider after dinner, my mom in a Buffalo Bills sweatshirt and my dad in his 82nd Airborne hat. It’s one of my most vivid childhood memories. I can still feel the warm metal behind my knees, hear the crickets and smell the grass.

Another recurring memory is when we girls were ages four, six and eight, and my dad would take us tobogganing during the long Buffalo winters. The four of us scooched to fit on the long sled going down the chute (so fast!) over and over. But only Jenny got the free ride back up the hill with my dad pulling her on the toboggan while Colleen and I waddled back up in our puffy jackets from K-mart.

Since her death, I’ve tried to remember my sister, not in her hospital bed, but flipping fearlessly on the spider or laughing on the toboggan, with her red cheeks and light green eyes, getting pulled up the snowy hill by my dad.

Back in Baltimore, I’m waiting for another Uber at the end of the day, and I’m so glad I came. It’s an amazing operation, and I feel lucky to have been a small part of this dedicated team for a few hours. (I eventually even learned that the long curtains at the glass windows are for privacy as patients take their medications.)

On my way out, I notice a sign on the wall that I didn’t see on my way in. It’s written in multicoloured markers with big artsy letters, advertising a program called, “Women Who Want to Change Their Lives,” meeting on Saturday mornings. I bet that’s where the skinny-legged girl was going! I hope she made it on time.

The sign is so positive and inviting, I want to go with her. But more than anything in the entire world, my heart aches to be able to attend that program with my sister. I feel the tears coming as I get into my Uber, and I realise that nothing about our family’s story is different at all.

Kelly O’Connor is a management consultant and lives in Washington, D.C.; she has been a patient advocate in the opioid crisis since 2017, including a TEDx Talk, “My Introduction to Narcan.”