Andy Burnham appears to be heading to No. 10 unopposed following Keir Starmer’s resignation and his main leadership rival’s decision to bow out of any contest for the top job. Attention is already turning to who the key players could be in a Burnham government.

Ed Miliband
The energy secretary and former Labour leader has long coveted the role of chancellor and was widely seen as the front runner to replace Rachel Reeves. He has been a “key champion of Burnham”, said The Guardian, and shares his “desire for Labour to enact more radical change, from tax overhaul to public control of utilities”. But Miliband’s strict adherence to net zero commitments has made him increasingly unpopular.

Wes Streeting
Former leadership rival Streeting, who resigned as health secretary last month, has withdrawn from the contest and decided to back Burnham. One of Labour’s best communicators, with a compelling personal story, but hailing from the right of the party, Streeting’s appointment to a top job could “align the competing wings”, City A.M. said.

Louise Haigh
The former transport secretary was forced to quit just months after Labour took office in 2024 over a prior fraud conviction, but has now emerged as a “crucial power broker” for the party’s “soft left”, said the BBC. She was “at the heart of the huge rebellion which scuppered the government’s welfare cuts in 2025”, led Burnham’s Makerfield by-election campaign and is “in line for a big cabinet job”.

Miatta Fahnbulleh
The MP for Peckham is a “rising star” and has been one of Burnham’s most vocal supporters, City A.M. said. A former civil servant who ran the left-wing New Economics Foundation think tank, Fahnbulleh resigned as a junior minister for communities in the aftermath of the May local elections. Hailing from the Labour left, she has “thrown her weight behind a number of highly controversial economic policies including imposing a wealth tax”.

Anneliese Midgley
Midgley was elected MP for Knowsley, near Makerfield, in 2024 but has been an “influential force in the Labour movement for much longer than that”, said the BBC. She worked for both Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn in opposition, and before that at the Trades Union Congress and Unite. She is seen as a “plausible candidate” for chief whip or even political secretary in Downing Street.

Three decades after Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds first sang that football was “coming home”, the lyrics are being belted out again during the World Cup. But some argue it’s wrong to claim that England is the home of football.

Dutch footballing legend Ruud Gullit has dismissed the “Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home)” song as “arrogant”, saying England does not “own football”. Likewise, the “English football public has a certain reputation globally”, said The Athletic. “There is an assumption of arrogance, of high expectations, of going into every major tournament presuming their team will win it.”

‘Scotch professors’
A group of 19th-century footballers known as the “Scotch professors” pioneered the modern passing game, Hamish Husband, from Scottish football magazine Tartan Army, told Sky News. Their new tactics were adopted by Scotland before spreading across Europe and other continents.

A letter written by Reverend Samuel Rutherford in the 1600s “holds the key to Scotland’s claim”, said Tom Burrows on BBC Newsround. He complained about people who gathered to play football on Sunday afternoons near his Anwoth Kirk. The church can “reasonably claim to be the earliest” site of a game of football, said William Wyeth, a curator of history at English Heritage. Bolstering the Scottish claims, archaeologists doing building works at Stirling Castle found a football behind a wood panel built in the 1540s. 

But others say the roots of the beautiful game may stretch back much further. More than 2,500 years ago, the Chinese played “tsu chu”, or “kickball”.

‘Past glories and melancholy’
 Wherever football began, England’s “coming home” lyrics may be regarded as a statement that the nation’s fans “view winning as the rightful outcome, and that anyone else winning is somehow wrong”, said The Athletic. But the fans “simply do not see the song that way”.

“The whole point of it is looking back on past glories and melancholy,” one told the outlet. “It’s not a triumphant song at all.”

Swimmers in the Chinese city of Chengdu bathe in an aquatic version of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”. A mosaic of colourful tiles transforms the 3,000-sq-metre pool in Jiangtan Park into a living artwork.  

VCG / Getty Images

The best golf resorts don’t just offer world-class courses. They’re also a sanctuary where guests can relax away from the fairways with a pampering spa treatment, delicious meal or countryside stroll. Tee off in style at these luxury resorts.

Viceroy at Ombria, Portugal
Located among the rolling Algarve hills, Viceroy at Ombria (pictured above) offers some of the region’s “prettiest views” and “top-tier dining options”, said Golf Monthly. It’s designed to be “accessible” for new players while catering to those who are “more capable longer hitters”. The property has “plenty to do for non-golfers” too, including swimming, hiking, cycling and exploring the “tucked away villages dotted around the valleys”.

JA Mar Hall Golf & Spa Resort, Scotland
This “terribly scenic” resort sits on the southern banks of the River Clyde and is just a 10-minute drive from Glasgow Airport, said Condé Nast Traveller. The 18-hole golf course spans 250 acres, and few experiences can compare to enjoying “the timeless beauty of the volcanic Old Kilpatrick Hills” while playing the fourth hole. Guests can also enjoy “excellent” food made with “farm-to-plate ingredients” in The Dining Room restaurant and indulge in a tipple at the “fantastic” cocktail bar.

Big Cedar Lodge, Missouri, US
Play under the “powder blue Missouri Ozarks sky” at this 4,600-acre property on the edge of Table Rock Lake, said Travel + Leisure. The “newest thrill” in the resort’s “ever-expanding golf playground” is the Cliffhangers: an “unconventional” course that features “cliff-hugging switchbacks and a maze of showy cart path water crossings”.

Keir Starmer Was a Waste of a Prime Minister
Steven Methven on Novara Media
Apparently, Keir Starmer feels betrayed, writes Steven Methven. What karma: maybe Jeremy Corbyn can “help him through the agony of a knife in the back”? Starmer’s actions did not much reflect his “grand moral superiority”. “Poor pensioners? Let them freeze. Those with disabilities? Let’s go full Dickens.” Above all, “our human rights lawyer in-chief failed to condemn” Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. What a waste “of opportunity, of energy, of hope. There won’t be many tears for him.”

How do we stop Britain’s decline?
Rachel Wolf in The Spectator
“This has been an abysmal decade,” writes Rachel Wolf from the 2030 Prosperity Alliance. Britain’s in “active decline”, leaving us “poorer” and “angrier”. Much more of this and I’d be “genuinely surprised if our democracy” survives. Policymakers are “worried” yet “refuse to make the big generational choices” needed on issues including housing, the NHS and the triple lock. “We can do better.” We must explain the hard truths “about what is required to leave the next generation better off than the last”.

Americans love to bash Britain. That’s their problem, not ours
James Marriott in The Times
“Sneering at Britain” was once a liberal American “hobby”, but now it’s “a bipartisan enthusiasm”, writes James Marriott. We have our “problems”, but this “increasingly hysterical” US disdain suggests it’s “more about them than” us. “As their own democracy sinks ever deeper into dysfunction”, they need another country “to pity”. That “Keir Starmer, for all his faults”, would never have staged an MMA “fight in the Downing Street garden” must be “very painful to the American sense of superiority”.