Are their outfits too expensive? Do they wield some undeclared influence? Labour women are under attack – and it feels just like the 1950s

I didn’t have powerful 1997 vibes last week, and not because I was too busy grumbling; I also hit the ground complaining about Tony Blair. But one thing did remind me of that era. A set of urgent questions were raised, which we could group loosely as, “Who the hell is that woman, and what does she think she’s wearing?

Back in the day, all eyes were on “Blair’s Babes”, a deeply considered epithet for an influx of Labour women, many of whom were actually older than the prime minister, but that didn’t matter. All it took was a babe or two, for “Babe” to be used to describe the collective. It wouldn’t happen today, so I guess we could call that progress.

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Ed Miliband’s ideas are more radical than his party’s; Emily Thornberry is alarmed by Trump; Rachel Reeves has an unlikely role model. What else do the new cabinet’s tomes reveal?

When the Conservatives started to shapeshift into their current ethno-nationalist, gerontophilic, free-market-fundamentalist form, we had to learn our way around its new disciples, and did so reading Britannia Unchained. We were right to, because that book is crazy, and Liz Truss – well, we all remember Liz Truss.

There is no like-for-like bible of Labour frontbench thought, but many members of the new cabinet have committed their views to paper. Only a couple of these books operate as blueprints for a policy environment (Ed Miliband’s Go Big, Lisa Nandy’s All In; Emily Thornberry’s pamphlet The Age of Trump); others are biographies (Nick Thomas-Symonds’s Harold Wilson) and autobiographies (Wes Streeting’s One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up); cultural theory (David Lammy’s Tribes); feminist-leaning listicles (Yvette Cooper’s She Speaks, Rachel Reeves’s The Women Who Made Modern Economics), and miscellany (Ian Murray’s This Is Our Story).

Various models promise to tone down decibels or help you focus on a friend. But the experience may not suit you

When something is a must-have accessory for Taylor Swift fans, it’s faster to say everyone’s got some: within a certain age range, that is.

Loop earplugs, designed to protect the ears, came to market in 2016 and the company has tripled its revenue since, reaching €126m (£107m) in 2023. These aren’t any old foam earplugs, but little nifty silicone ones that come between the roar of the crowd and your two-in-a-lifetime eardrums.

They had different takes on immigration, the monarchy and Britain’s colonial past – how did they end up swapping numbers?

Emily, 37, Plymouth

Occupation Nurse

Janelle Monáe’s trousers do not represent a vagina. They represent a vulva. Have some respect!

I have a stick up my arse about the difference between “less” and “fewer”, and women in the generations below have the same about “vagina” and “vulva”, and even though the principle is the same – why not just use the right word, instead of the wrong one? – I have never been able to see their problem. Everyone’s got the gist. Why make a scene?

It happened that I recently spent some hallowed time with millennials and also saw Janelle Monáe, live, and this all coincided at a festival that it would be crass to mention for the 91st time – but suffice it to say, I have finally come round to their point of view.

By the end of the week, Keir Starmer could be the UK’s next prime minister. Why do voters feel they don’t know him?

Polls say Keir Starmer’s Labour party is on track for a historic win. Yet despite the turn towards his party, voters don’t seem as convinced by Starmer himself. So who is Keir Starmer and what do we know about the forces that have shaped him?

His biographer Tom Baldwin traces Starmer’s life from his childhood in Surrey with his toolmaker father and nurse mother, through his radical university days to his life as a left-leaning barrister. He examines how taking on the role of director of public prosecutions changed Starmer and what explains what some people have characterised as a sudden move to the centre ground. And he tells Michael Safi how Starmer’s refusal to adhere to a strict political ideology could be a strength.