Michael Gove: Labour is hurtling further left. Winter is coming, says Michael Gove. It’s impossible, before the local elections, to predict the weather, but the long-term climate of this country is getting colder. The enterprising, the young, the aspirational, Jewish communities and genuine liberals have much to fear: the direction of government ‘is moving, injudiciously but inevitably and ineluctably, to the left’. The pain of Labour’s losses to the Greens this week will be more keenly felt than that of their losses to Reform. Labour knows it needs to court Reform voters, but, Michael writes: ‘In politics, reason is, as David Hume argued, a slave to the passions.’ Labour wants to ‘feel good’ about its mission again, hence a return to the left, back to the days where ‘nowhere was safer for a Labour activist than a postcode where every male under 70 is in a chore jacket and the only drill you hear is Central Cee in your AirPods’.

Tim Shipman: how to save your political career. After 25 years of political reporting, Tim Shipman has had enough. Of poor leadership, that is. ‘I’m sick of watching the same mistakes repeated,’ he writes. ‘I’m keen to help. So, listen up Nigel, Kemi, Zack, Ed, Ed, Andy, Angela and Wes – and you Keir, it’s never too late to learn.’ The crux is this: plan first, strategy and tactics second, then narrative to explain, then charisma to apply. The plan seems to be the hardest bit, and the current leadership hopefuls don’t have much to shout about: ‘Andy, “Manchesterism” is a slogan and a vibe, not a plan. Angela, being working class and mouthy isn’t a plan.’ Great statesmen, Tim concludes, ‘understand that politics is not a dirty word, it is the means by which anything of consequence gets done’.

Max Pemberton: cancer is rocketing among young people. There is a new question that psychiatrist Max Pemberton is asked at work: ‘Do I have cancer?’ Millennials and Gen X, the generations ‘who have done absolutely everything they were told to do’, are getting cancer in their thirties and forties. ‘Someone born in 1990 is twice as likely to develop colon cancer and four times as likely to develop rectal cancer.’ They drink and smoke less than their parents, ‘they have signed up to the wellness gospel’ but they are ‘the ones who are dying’. The most likely suspect is ultra-processed food. ‘Sedentariness is part of it too’, as may be ‘the gut microbiome’, ‘early antibiotic exposure, lower rates of breastfeeding, and the rise of caesarean delivery’.

Lisa Haseldine: maternity care is in a state of crisis. ‘Maternity care in Britain is in a state of crisis,’ Lisa Haseldine warns after speaking to mothers who have given birth in NHS hospitals in England. Chelsea, whose baby was born at 26 weeks, ‘often felt dismissed’ by the health service. She wasn’t told that her baby daughter had developed sepsis and later discovered the girl had been given six blood transfusions without her parents’ consent. Chelsea’s baby died in November with ‘unexpected neonatal death’ listed as the cause. Theo Clarke, a former Conservative MP, was told by an NHS staff member ‘not my baby, not my problem’, when she asked for help following an emergency C-section and postpartum haemorrhaging. The number of women injured or dying after giving birth is slowly rising but ‘these statistics capture only the most extreme consequences’, since ‘there are also tens of thousands of women who walk out of hospital holding their newborns, but who nonetheless have sustained physical and mental scars’.

Nicky Haslam: Queen Elizabeth II – Her Life in Style. Queen Elizabeth’s appearance ‘made you feel simultaneously remote from and close to her’, Nicky Haslam remembers. Her ‘great knack was never to dress à la page, meaning her clothes would never date her’, which was even more impressive given ‘there were few people of taste in the early years of her reign to guide her’. Looking at her uniform for en parade, Haslam ‘wonders if perhaps some subtle metal web was inserted to keep that narrow back ramrod for hour fours’ as her mare trotted along at walking pace. Meanwhile ‘some of the evening wear is truly audacious: the T-shirt of fauvist jazziness in primary-coloured sequins; those extravagantly embroidered bell sleeves, bling enough that you can imagine Madame Marcos wearing them to a Californian dinner’.