Keir Starmer is “reflecting on political realities” after Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield, according to a cabinet minister.

The soon-to-be-former Greater Manchester mayor is expected to challenge the prime minister’s leadership in the coming days after winning the north-west by-election.

It’s widely believed Burnham has the backing from more than enough Labour MPs to trigger a leadership contest against Starmer.

The Observer reported that the PM intends to set out a timetable for his departure on Monday, recognising that his time in office has run out.

The report comes after Starmer insisted on Friday: “If there is a contest, then yes I will run, I will stand, and I’ve said repeatedly I’m not going to walk away from that.”

Asked for his take on the beleaguered prime minister’s future, business and trade secretary Peter Kyle told Sky News: “All I know for a fact is that he has been engaging in conversations with a wide, wide range of people, including myself, and that he is, as well as working really hard over this weekend, I think he is making time to reflect on the political realities, challenges and opportunities that he finds himself in.”

Asked whether Starmer should quit, Kyle said he had a “very frank conversation with the prime minister about all these issues” on Friday, where the prime minister was “thoughtful” and calm.

“He led the conversation,” the cabinet minister said.

“Repeatedly, the prime minister asked about the country. Not once in that conversation, which was a lengthy conversation, did he ever ask about self-interest; it was always about the country. And I think that is the tone of the conversation I had with him.

“It was frank, and I think that is the mindset that the prime minister is in as he goes into this weekend, through which he has been working very hard as prime minister, as he always does, but also trying to make time to reflect on the political challenges at the moment.”

Kyle added: “My role is in putting the country first, is to uphold the authority of this government, to make sure that we can govern through a moment of political challenge, and that we are 100% focused on delivering.”

Asked about the reports that Starmer intends to resign on Monday, he said: “I have nothing to believe they are true. I’m seeing a lot of speculation out there.

“The only thing I can say with fact is that the prime minister is hard at work, as he is every day, he is one of the most hardworking people I have ever come across.”

“Does that mean you don’t know if he plans to resign or he does not plan to resign?” presenter Trevor Phillips asked.

He said both he and Starmer are “focusing on the job”.

Asked if he would vote for Starmer in a potential leadership contest, Kyle said: “I’m just not going to engage in what the days ahead look like.”

Challengers need the support of at least 81 fellow Labour MPs to successfully trigger a leadership race.

The incumbent leader does not need any nominations to be put on the ticket.

Listen 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.

We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about the sleep rules a neurologist follows for healthy ageing.

And now, that same expert – Dr Matthew Walker, Neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience and Bioengineering at the University of Texas at Dallas – has shared the evening routine mistakes he’d never make.

Speaking to HuffPost UK, he said: “The mistake most people make at night is assuming sleep is like a light switch – flick it off and you’re out.

“Sleep is far more like landing a plane. It takes time to gradually descend onto the runway of good sleep,” he continued.

He added, “A few things that keep the plane circling” are:

“Our body has to drop its core temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep, which is why a cool bedroom – around 18°C – beats a warm one,” the expert said.

Interestingly, though, “A hot bath [or shower] an hour before bed works by a delightful paradox: it brings blood to the surface, and you offload heat afterward, dropping your core temperature.”

“Alcohol is a sedative, and sedation is not sleep. It fragments your night and blocks dream sleep, so you wake feeling unrestored even after a ‘full’ night” of kip, he explained.

Alcohol can also worsen sleep apnoea, which makes you tired in the daytime. Some experts recommend we stop drinking alcohol three to four house before bed.

“Caffeine has a half-life of around five to six hours, meaning a quarter of that 2pm coffee is still circulating at bedtime,” Dr Walker continued.

Researchers think that drinking coffee between 7 and 8am might help us access more of its benefits.

“Evening light tells your brain it’s still daytime and suppresses melatonin. Dim the house [and] treat the last hour [of your day] as a wind-down,” the neuroscientist advised.

Putting your phone away an hour before bedtime has previously been suggested as good sleep hygiene by multiple other experts.

“If you can’t sleep after about twenty-five minutes, get up and do something quiet and dim until sleepiness returns,” Dr Walker said.

“Your brain is brilliant at forming associations, and you don’t want it learning that bed is the place where you lie awake. Said another way, you’d never sit at the dinner table waiting to get hungry. So why would you lie in bed waiting to get sleepy?”

We’ve written before about how staying in bed for too long is the worst thing you can do after waking up at 3am.

A leadership battle within Labour will “cost” the country, according to a bleak warning from the UK’s former top civil servant.

Reports have suggested Keir Starmer will announce his decision to resign on Monday, following Andy Burnham’s win in the Makerfield by-election.

The soon-to-be-former Greater Manchester mayor was already expected to challenge the prime minister’s leadership as soon as he is sworn into the Commons.

Burnham is said to be hoping for a “coronation”, meaning Starmer would effectively hand the keys of No.10 straight to him without first triggering a messy leadership race within Labour.

But the PM insisted only on Friday that he would not walk away from government and would fight in any leadership contest triggered.

Simon Case, who was the cabinet secretary until December 2024 and now sits in the House of Lords, told the BBC that there is a price to this ongoing speculation.

He told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “Uncertainty is a big challenge and a big problem for government.

“If Keir Starmer is left in place, but without any authority, it’s impossible to effectively carry out the business of government.

“Equally, if we have a leadership contest that then goes on for some time, you continue that level of uncertainty.”

“Uncertainty isn’t free,” he said. “It actually costs us money. You can see already that the markets are responding, the amount of money we’re paying for the enormous levels of debt that this country has are going up with every moment of uncertainty.

“And equally, uncertainty costs us opportunity. All the time politicians are having conversations among themselves about who should be leader and prime minster, time goes by where issues of real concern to people up and down the country – the health service and education – all that time is lost.”

He added: “We’re now in a real bind. Neither option is a good one at the moment.”

If Burnham does replace Starmer, he will be the UK’s seventh prime minister in a decade.

Asked about how this upheaval impacts the country’s reputation, Case said: “I’m afraid it generates a pretty high degree of eye rolling amongst our allies.

“For decades, the UK was seen as a dependable, solid citizen on the world stage that people could do business with our prime ministers.”

He continued: “Changes of direction, new policies, new people, that costs us influence on the world stage, that costs us in our alliances.”

Case also urged Burnham to “do his homework” before toppling Starmer.

“You cannot duck the big decisions. Coming in and thinking you can govern simply by being a better communicator, or somehow vibe-coding to borrow a phrase from the AI-world, that you can somehow make it up as you go along… you cannot through these big challenges.”

Listen 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.

Microfeminism describes small but intentional ways women push back against deep-seated gender expectations and biases: a teacher calling the dad on a kid’s emergency contact form when both parents are listed. Asking “Men’s team or women’s team?” when someone brings up a game they just watched.

It’s dismantling the patriarchy, but in bite-sized ways. Financial coach and author Tori Dunlap is a big fan of these little acts of feminism, so last month, she asked her 2 million followers to tell her “the most unhinged way that you practice micro feminism in your life”.

She didn’t want cutesy, soft-pedalling answers, she told people on TikTok and Instagram. “I’m not talking about ‘assuming the doctor is a woman,’ give me insane ones thx,” Dunlap wrote.

Women in the comments did not disappoint. Some of our favourite responses from the prompt include:

• “I give men unsolicited tips at the gym.”

• “I change the voice on my Alexa to a male voice so that my kids don’t think they can speak to a woman and expect an instantaneous reply.”

• “I recently told an angry man, ‘maybe we can chat when you’re feeling less emotional’ and it was worth years of therapy.”

• “Stop moving out of the way for men in public. A lot of them will barge into you because they EXPECT you to make yourself small for them. Stop doing that.”

• “Calling male work superiors ‘girl’ after they refer to me as ‘bro.’”

Dunlap, the author of Financial Feminist: Overcome the Patriarchy’s Bullsh*t to Master Your Money and Build a Life You Love, told HuffPost her favourite responses tended to be ones where the women came first in heteronormative relationships.

“I loved the women who said they put their name first on their wedding invite or on the deed of their shared home,” she said.

Running a feminist financial education company, Dunlap often talks about ways women can incorporate these values into their everyday life: paying off debts, building savings, leaving abusive relationships. Asking this particular question on Instagram and TikTok seemed like a natural fit for her brand.

“We actually originally posted this video in May 2025, and it received about 30 million views, and when we reposted it again this year, we saw a similar crazy amount of comments,” she said.

“I think people love the post so much firstly because it’s petty and inspirational at the same time, but also because people love reading all the comments,” she added. “It’s like a little rallying cry.”

Susan J. Douglas, a cultural critic and professor of communication and media at University of Michigan, said microfeminism echoes the phrase “the personal is political” – a foundational rallying cry of the women’s movement in the late 1960s.

“Through seemingly minor performative acts – gestures, funny remarks and actions – these women are insisting on equitable treatment and on challenging very outdated stereotypes,” she said.

Though it may not be systemic or large-scale political activism, the way a woman moves in her personal life, especially in male-dominated spaces, can absolutely shift everyday gender norms.

“The video and the comments exemplify what Gloria Steinem advocated as ‘everyday rebellions,’” Douglas said, referring to the small, routine and personal acts of defiance against patriarchal norms and systemic sexism that Steinem argued anyone could perform in their daily lives.

Darcy Lockman, a journalist-turned-psychologist and the author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership, also appreciated the video when she saw it. Women turning the tables on society’s and their own assumptions is a huge deal, she said.

“When shifts like that happen, the world opens up,” Lockman told HuffPost. “It takes lots of micros to make a macro change.”

Laura Kuenssberg put a top Conservative under the microscope on Sunday with a brutal reminder of just how poorly the party did in the Makerfield by-election.

Labour’s Andy Burnham secured the north-west seat on Thursday with 54.8% of the vote while Reform UK’s Rob Kenyon came in second, with 34.5%.

The rising far-right group Restore Britain secured 6.8%, equal to 3,111 votes while the Conservatives’ Michael Winstanley came in fourth with just 997 votes – 2.2% of the vote share.

That means the official opposition lost their £500 deposit, as they secured less than 5% of the vote.

On her BBC show, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the presenter asked shadow chancellor Mel Stride to defend the shocking performance.

But the Conservative MP deflected by talking about the Aberdeen South by-election result, where the Tories took a seat from the SNP last Thursday.

“First win in a by-election in Scotland since 1967,” he said. “It shows what good, clear, policy offering can deliver.”

He continued: “In Makerfield, that has been a Labour stronghold for about 100, 120, years. I think the big story was actually the weakness of Reform in the face of that challenge…”

“But in 2019, you got 34% of the vote in Makerfield,” Kuenssberg reminded him. “This time you got 2%.

“In those kinds of parts of the country, that suggests you’ve gone way back.

“A leader like Boris Johnson had a hope in those in kind of constituencies.

“Under Kemi Badenoch, it doesn’t seem like you do.”

He replied: “In 2019, we swept away a number of red wall seats and that was not one of them. That has been historically Labour and solidly Labour for a very long time.”

“So it’s OK that you got 997 voters, then?” Kuenssberg said.

But Stride replied by once again referring to Reform UK’s performance, insisting they were coming down in the polls.

“They’re not surging [in popularity] the way they were last year, but you don’t look competitive yet,” she replied.

Nigel Farage’s party has long tried to position itself as the real opposition to the government by displacing the Conservatives.

But Reform UK struggled to compete against Burnham in Makerfield, making it the third straight by-election loss for the party after separate contests in Gorton and Denton, and Caerphilly.

Listen 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.

The return of warm weather means the return of open-toed shoes, drawing attention to just how your feet look after a long fall and winter.

Beyond pumice stones and at-home foot peel masks, some people choose to focus on the aesthetics of another part of their feet: their toes. Specifically, their toe hair.

The amount of hair on your toes depends on a variety of factors. In rare cases, your toe hair can even offer a peek into your health.

Below, doctors share what you should know about the hair on your toes and how to safely remove it if you choose.

Hair on toes is normal – it’s neither “good” or “bad,” said Dr. Natasha Bhuyan, the vice president of in-office care and national medical director at Amazon One Medical.

“It really just indicates your genetics, your hormones, factors that you often can’t influence,” she said. The amount of hair you have on your toes may also vary depending on your ethnic background.

What “normal” toe hair looks like for one person can look completely different for someone else.

“Everyone’s normal is different, but hair on toes is normal,” said Dr. Michael Richardson, a family medicine doctor in Boston. “Just because you have hair on your toes doesn’t mean that’s abnormal.”

“Toe hair is not going to be the first sign if something is going wrong,” Richardson said, “but if you’re noticing that it’s less than normal for you, that could be signs of something damaging that area.”

Loss of toe hair could be from contact damage, which can happen if there’s lot of friction against shoes. “I’ll see that in runners, for example,” said Richardson.

“There are instances where the hair on your toes could change because of other factors, like if you’re taking a medication that influences hair growth … steroids can sometimes cause hair growth,” Bhuyan said.

Changes in blood flow can also affect the amount of hair on your toes, which is a concern.

“If there’s decrease in the vasculature, so any damage to the blood vessels – we’ll see this with peripheral artery disease – where the blood is just not circulating as well, the tissue isn’t as healthy and can’t grow hair,” Richardson said.

In the place of hair, the toes will have a smooth, shiny look, Richardson said.

You may also notice issues related to poor circulation, like cold feet or pain when walking, Bhuyan added. This tends to be more common in older adults and smokers.

“But more often than not, toe hair is going to be normal. If you don’t know where to go, it’s always a good idea to talk to your doctor,” Richardson added.

If you want to remove the hair on your toes, it’s perfectly safe to do so, as long as you follow the right methodology.

“I would say the safest method to remove hair when it’s sparse … just tweezing it is the best,” said Bhuyan, before adding that the tweezers should be cleaned before doing so.

“Some people will do things like shaving. I think if you do the typical shave with warm water, use a gel, that’s fine, just to minimise ingrown hairs,” Bhuyan noted.

You can also try hair removal creams, but if you do that, do a small patch test first, “because some people can have reactions to hair creams on their skin,” she said. If you want a long-term solution, you could also do laser hair removal or electrolysis.

In the end, it’s OK to remove the hair on your toes; it doesn’t serve a health purpose, Bhuyan said.