The UK culture secretary has dismissed calls for Britain to re-enter the European Union as “odd”, a day after her former cabinet colleague Wes Streeting said the country’s future lies back in the bloc.

Lisa Nandy criticised the former health secretary on Sunday, saying his comments over the weekend risked reopening a debate that was settled with the Brexit referendum 10 years ago.

With the issue now likely to feature prominently in the Makerfield byelection and the Labour leadership contest that is expected to follow, Nandy insisted the prime minister, Keir Starmer, was right to have ruled out rejoining the EU.

She told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: “I actually think this is just a bit odd. I listened to what Wes had to say very carefully yesterday, and I know that he’s got a strong view about this, and always has had, that we shouldn’t have left the European Union.

“Frankly, that’s one that I share. I campaigned for remain, I think it [Brexit] was a mistake, and I think the Brexit deal has been a real problem for us. But I don’t really understand why the sudden focus on Europe.”

She added: “We’re already, as a government, trying to repair in a pragmatic way the needless damage that was done by that poor Brexit deal to people’s living standards in towns like mine, without reopening the circular arguments that we ended up in as a country.”

Streeting’s remarks at a speech in London have put the issue of Britain’s relationship with the EU high on the agenda in the Makerfield byelection, where Greater Manchester’s Labour mayor, Andy Burnham, intends to run on a promise to challenge Starmer for the party leadership.

Streeting, who this week resigned from the cabinet in protest against Starmer’s leadership, said on Saturday: “In 2026, the British people increasingly see that in a dangerous world we must club together, both to rebuild our economy and trade, and improve our defence against the shared threats from Russian aggression and America First.

“The biggest economic opportunity we have is on our doorstep. We need a new special relationship with the EU, because Britain’s future lies with Europe – and one day back in the European Union.”

He added that he intended to stand if a leadership contest was started – though it remains unclear whether he has enough parliamentary support to do so.

The byelection has not yet been formally called and nor has Burnham been chosen as Labour’s candidate, yet his policy positions are already being carefully picked over as signs for what he might do if he goes on to become prime minister.

Burnham told ITV News on Saturday that rejoining the EU would not be a focus in his campaign. “In the long term there is a case for that, but I’m not advocating that in this byelection,” he said. “In fact, what I am saying is focus now domestically. Britain has got to focus very much on the here and now and the issues that are affecting people.”

But Josh Simons, the Labour MP who is vacating the Makerfield seat to make way for his ally Burnham, suggested that nationalisation of utilities could be an important part of his pitch to voters.

“Energy, water, social housing – those things that are the basics of our lives that we all depend on – have gotten so expensive,” he told the BBC on Sunday.

“And one of the reasons why they’ve gotten so expensive – not the only, but one of the reasons why they’ve gotten so expensive – is that we privatise a lot of them, and often the bills that we pay go to the shareholders.”

Meanwhile, allies of Starmer say the prime minister has not given up hope of remaining in office, insisting he will enter the race if a leadership election is called.

Asked on Sunday whether she thought Starmer would run in a leadership contest, Nandy said: “He said he will … I haven’t spoken to him this weekend, but I’ve spoken to him several times over the last week, and obviously he’s shown before that he’s up for a fight.”

At least four people have been killed in a large-scale retaliatory strike by Ukraine on Russia’s regions, including Moscow, Russian authorities have said.

The wave of almost 600 Ukrainian drones struck overnight across 14 Russian regions, as well as the Crimean peninsula and the Black and Azov seas, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday, with the region around the capital among the worst-hit.

Three people were killed in the Moscow region and one in the Belgorod region, authorities said, as Russian air defences shot down 556 drones overnight and neutralised another 30 after dawn.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said last week that more drone strikes would be launched in retaliation for a deadly three-day Russian attack across Ukraine that killed more than 20 people and injured about 50 others.

Moscow’s regional governor, Andrei Vorobyov, said a woman had been killed when a home was hit in Khimki, north of the capital, in what he described as a “massive” strike on the region, which surrounds but does not include the capital.

Vorobyov said rescuers were still searching the debris for another person. Two men had also been killed in the village of Pogorelki, 10km (6 miles) north of Moscow, after drone debris fell on a construction site, he added, and several residential high-rises and “infrastructure facilities” were damaged.

“Since 3am this morning, air defence forces have been repelling a large-scale UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] attack on the capital region,” Vorobyov said, adding that four people had also been wounded.

In the capital itself, air defence systems intercepted more than 80 drones overnight, the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, posted on social media. Twelve people were wounded and “minor damage” was recorded where the debris fell, he said.

One of the strikes wounded construction workers and damaged three houses at a site near Moscow’s oil and gas refinery, Sobyanin said, adding that refinery production had not been disrupted and the “technology” of the refinery had not been affected.

The country’s largest airport – Moscow’s Sheremetyevo – said drone debris had fallen inside its perimeter without causing any damage.

The Moscow region is often attacked by drones but the city itself, about 400km (250 miles) from the border with Ukraine, is less frequently targeted. In Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, one man was killed in a drone attack on a lorry, authorities said.

Zelenskyy posted on social media on Friday that Ukraine was “entirely justified” in striking Russia’s oil industry and military production facilities to hamper Moscow’s war effort, as well as hitting “those directly responsible for committing war crimes against Ukraine and Ukrainians”.

Russia, whose full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, launched more than 1,500 drones and dozens of missiles in the consecutive waves of attacks across Ukraine on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Ukrainian officials said.

A cruise missile hit a nine-storey apartment block in Kyiv on Thursday, killing 24 people, including three children.

Ukraine’s air force said on Sunday it had intercepted a further 279 Russian drones overnight, out of a total of 287 launched.

Moscow and Kyiv have returned to trading attacks since the end last Tuesday of a three-day truce – which both sides accused the other of violating – to mark the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in the second world war.

Diplomatic efforts to end the four-year-old conflict are at a standstill, with Kyiv unwilling to accept Moscow’s maximalist demands for territory in the eastern Donbas region and US attention turned to the US-Israeli war against Iran.

With Agence France-Presse and Reuters

It’s a chilly spring evening in what was once a Catholic church in a left-behind County Durham pit village, and Ian McKellen admits he is feeling emotional.

“This is the only company of actors in the United Kingdom and it’s in … Horden?” he says. “I’m feeling very emotional. This fulfils all my romantic dreams I’ve had ever since I discovered the joys of theatre-going and acting.”

On Saturday, McKellen formally opened a new space for Ensemble 84, a theatre company formed 18 months ago that auditioned for local talent and gave people jobs as actors and performers.

This is how it should be, McKellen told the Guardian. He said it was “shameful” that the opportunity to join a professional repertory company of actors, for performers to learn their trade as he and others had done, no longer existed.

“The National Theatre makes its own sets,” he said. “It has a wig department. It has a makeup department. It has a property department. It has a set department. It has a publicity department. They’re all on salary. Some of them will be on a pension.

“The National Theatre doesn’t employ actors full-time. They’re hired helps. That’s not right. Laurence Olivier was a working actor and he ran that company in the same spirit that Henry Irving had run his company.”

The same criticism could be levelled at the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It is no longer a ‘company’,” he said. “Actors make each other better when they work together over a long period. The only place in the country that is using actors under contract to do plays over a number of months, if not years, to do plays is in Horden? Where?”

Many people will be asking the same question. Those who do know Horden will know that the village, on the east Durham coast near Peterlee, is only ever in the news if it is a story about poverty, or crime, or its numbered streets, or how cheap it is to buy a property.

Ensemble 84 has already staged Brecht’s More Courage and Her Children, as translated and adapted for them by Lee Hall. Next up is Hamlet.

The company was founded by the theatre director Mark Dornford-May, who 25 years ago, following a similar model, co-founded the internationally acclaimed Isango Ensemble in a township on the edge of Cape Town in South Africa.

Ensemble 84 was still only 18 months old, said Dornford-May, but “we are now probably the biggest employer in Horden since the National Coal Board closed”.

“Isn’t that extraordinary? A theatre company replaces the NCB in terms of employment opportunities. It’s just phenomenal,” he said. “There has been so little hope here and we are offering hope. Horden in the media is ‘the worst place in County Durham’ or it’s drugs or it’s poverty or whatever, but the heart that this community had during the miners’ strike is still there.

“It’s had a couple of palpitations but if you look for it you’ll still find it … its heart still beats. We’ve managed to tap into that, which is magical.”

The company has a core cast of 15 performers. They include Willow Pearson, who gave up studying biochemistry at university to join the ensemble. “The concept of a theatre company in Horden is fantastic,” she said. “Why shouldn’t there be one?”

Wendy Hindmarch worked as a civil servant and was missing her son, who had flown the nest to study drama in London.

“I was just scrolling Facebook and I saw the audition notice and thought well, I’ve got a good job, a good pension, but I’ll just go along and see what happens,” she said. “I didn’t really expect to get in and then I did, and yes, it’s changed my life. I love this job more than anything. I can’t imagine going back to the office.”

On Saturday McKellen cut the red ribbon at the Our Lady, Star of the Sea Catholic church venue, now called the Playhouse. He entertained an invited audience with anecdotes from a career as one of Britain’s finest classical actors, as well as playing Gandalf and Magneto.

Off the top of his head he performed “All the world’s a stage” from As You Like It and watched, gripped, as Ensemble 84 actors sang and performed scenes from the forthcoming production of Shakespeare’s First Quarto of Hamlet, an earlier, shorter version of the standard.

McKellen said he might be 86, but he if lived in Horden he too would have auditioned. He might even have got a call-back, joked Dornford-May.