Features

Thursday

David Hempleman-Adams

Up, up and down again: my attempt to balloon the Atlantic

I was hoping to fly the first hydrogen balloon across the Atlantic and had been waiting for a year to get the right call from our weather men. I had postponed the trip last year, when there was not a single track that would get us from the USA to Europe. Was it climate change? I had flown solo across the Atlantic in a balloon twice before, although when we say solo, the reality is a huge team of backstage staff to get you into the air safely and support the flight and the landing. This would be no different, except I would be accompanied by two fellow balloon pilots, Bert Padelt and Frederik Paulsen. In the past, weather patterns were stable for days. They now change much more quickly, as anyone trying to barbecue this summer will know.

Max Jeffery

Meet the techno-optimists hoping to save the world

Future House is a weird private members’ club. There’s a mattress on the floor for napping, a bathtub designed to hold ice and bottled beers, a robot dog imported from China and a purple neon sign that reads: ‘Just F***ing Build Something.’ Around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, the place is rammed. ‘I missed the dotcom era, I’m not missing this one,’ someone says. ‘People need to stop moaning about artificial intelligence,’ says another. Future House, in an old coaching house in Hackney, is described on its website as ‘London’s techno-optimist members’ club’. Techno-optimism? Adherents believe that technological progress is the best way to fix the world’s problems.

James Heale

Meet the MAGA megafans

Milwaukee, Wisconsin If you want to see how Donald Trump has changed his party, look at what attendees wore to this week’s convention in Milwaukee. Gone are the days when Republicans plumped for preppy blazers and demure khakis; now the fashion is for ostentatious displays of red, white and blue. Even the red ‘MAGA’ baseball caps of 2016 have been eclipsed, replaced by this year’s must-have accessory of the cowboy hat – a classic symbol of rugged individualism. It’s a sartorial revolution, as well as a political one. ‘Everyone loves having their photo taken,’ says one press photographer.

Freddy Gray

Is Donald Trump now unstoppable?

‘You’re gonna be so blessed,’ said Pastor James Roemke, doing a pretty good Donald Trump impersonation in the warm-up to his Benediction of the Republican National Convention on Monday. ‘You’re gonna be tired of being blessed, I guarantee it, believe me.’ Sitting in the stands with a bandage on his ear, Trump enjoyed the joke – a riff on his famous line from 2016 about ‘winning’. He smiled almost beatifically for the cameras. In the wake of the shooting, Trump has begun to sound, believe it or not, graceful and magnanimous It was poignant, too, because in his case it seemed so true: God, or some supernatural force beyond our understanding, does seem to be showering the Republican nominee with blessings of late.

Kate Andrews

Why Trump forgave J.D. Vance

It shows a remarkable level of confidence from Donald Trump that he’s chosen for his running-mate the man who once called him ‘America’s Hitler’. J.D. Vance, the 39-year-old junior senator from Ohio, made the private comment in 2016, as he rose to fame off the back of his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy. The book recounts what it was like to grow up in a deprived rust-belt town, where his family and neighbours had ‘no college degree’ and ‘poverty’s the family tradition’. Vance escaped by joining the US Marine Corps, which included a tour in Iraq.

Thursday

Theo Hobson

The C of E needs to talk about sex

My friend Andy is getting married. It’s about time – he and his girlfriend have a one-year-old daughter. He wants to get married in church, so I introduced him by email to the local vicar. I was copied in to their initial correspondence. The vicar told Andy that the Church of England prohibits sex outside of marriage, so a church wedding would not be possible unless the couple repented of their sin and lived apart in the run-up to the wedding. Of course I made up the last bit. The vicar congratulated him and his partner on their decision and started talking dates. But isn’t it true that the church teaches that sex should only take place in marriage? Yes and no. The ambiguity sheds important light on the current crisis over homosexuality.

Charlie Taylor

Can Labour solve our prisons crisis?

There is no doubt that the new government (and in particular the prisons minister, James Timpson) is faced with a serious prison population crisis. Original thinking and a willingness to challenge the system will be the only way out. As HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, I know this all too well. Last month I inspected Durham, a Georgian reception jail which regularly vies for the dubious honour of being the most overcrowded prison along with Leeds, Bedford and Wandsworth. Half of all prisoners are functionally illiterate and yet few are taught to read With remand populations (those who have yet to be convicted) at historic highs, reception prisons across the country are busier than ever.

Svitlana Morenets

What I saw at the Okhmatdyt bomb site

Kyiv For weeks, Kyiv had felt relatively safe compared with just about everywhere else in Ukraine. People had adjusted to wartime life as the city’s air defences managed to intercept most of Russia’s missiles and drones. There had been a sense that things were improving. This was shattered on Monday morning when a missile struck a children’s cancer hospital in the capital. Okhmatdyt is the largest paediatric clinic in Ukraine, the equivalent of London’s Great Ormond Street. Each year, it treats more than 20,000 children with the most serious health conditions. That Russia had targeted it came as a shock but not a surprise: some 1,700 medical facilities in Ukraine have been hit since the start of the full-scale invasion.

Lara Prendergast

Trade like a tradwife

I love to complain about my phone. It has ruined everything, from friendships to childhood to my memory. But if I stop the bitching and think clearly for a moment, I must admit that my phone is a far more liberating bit of kit than the washing machine or the contraceptive pill. Largely that’s because my phone allows me to work from anywhere. For many women, particularly those with children, this is a dramatic and radical change. Claire Roscoe’s story is a good example. Both she and her husband lost their City jobs in the wake of the pandemic. Pregnant with her second child, Claire needed to find work again promptly.

Elisa Segrave

Don’t bribe your dog with treats

‘Do NOT look Lulu in the eye. Keep your voice low and soft and ignore her barking. Do NOT make arm or hand gestures. You can give her a treat, letting her come to you or drop it for her. She has been doing well with strangers outside but her property is difficult for her.’ I was alarmed by this WhatsApp message from my cousin. I was due to visit. Would I be attacked by Lulu when I walked in? Surely I wouldn’t remember these instructions forwarded from her trainer by then? My cousin’s family, like my own, have  always had dogs. But I was dismayed that, like most modern owners, they had sunk so low as to bribe their pets with food. I was trying to resist the contemporary training-with-food obsession with my own new Jack Russell, Peggy.

Quentin Letts

The secret diary of Sue Gray

Once we entered Downing Street a No. 10 protocol adviser took Vic upstairs to show her the facilities in the private flat. ‘That sofa’s gotta go,’ said her ladyship. ‘So has Simon Case,’ I said. The protocol officer was shocked. ‘So new, and almost without a stain,’ he protested. More than can be said for the Cabinet Secretary. For the first few hours it was easy to keep the Prime Minister busy with congratulatory calls from world leaders. He was fine once we reminded him not to shout at them like an Englishman addressing foreigners. Emmanuel Macron was overfamiliar, Giorgia Meloni tearful – it seems she had a hot pash for Rishi Sunak – and the chap from Reykjavik went all glacial (Icelandic speciality) when we refused to talk about fish quotas.

Katy Balls

Starmer must move fast without losing his head

When Keir Starmer’s Labour party gathered on Monday to celebrate their election victory, the difficulty was finding a big enough venue. There were so many MPs that aides had to abandon Labour’s usual meeting room on parliament’s committee corridor, and instead head for Church House, where Tony Blair met his party after the 1997 landslide. Cabinet ministers joked that their biggest problem in government would be learning their colleagues’ names. Later in Strangers’ Bar, the queue for a drink went six rows back. ‘It’s freshers’ week,’ said one newbie. Yet some in the party still felt a sense of unease. ‘This majority is a mile wide and an inch deep,’ said one new MP. ‘Lots of these wins are very slight.

Thursday

Tibor Fischer

The Orban acolyte who became his fiercest critic

All sorts of people are grateful to Peter Magyar for bounding into the arena of Hungarian public life. Journalists, chiefly. Many a grizzled, lugubrious Hungarian hack had tears of gratitude welling as Magyar demolished the tedium and predictability of Hungarian party politics: Viktor Orban trampling a feeble collection of bunglers and chisellers, known as the opposition, again and again. Of course, the foreign correspondents were even more elated. Vilifying Orban? Step this way for your eulogy and hosannas, you smooth-talking cosmopolitan. Magyar is certainly deserving of attention; he’s fought a remarkable one-man blitzkrieg.

Dan Hitchens

Does Keir Starmer’s atheism matter?

Good Friday, 2021, at Jesus House For All Nations church in Brent, north-west London. Face masked, head bowed, hands clasped, Sir Keir Starmer stands alongside Pastor Agu Irukwu. The pastor opens his arms to invoke Almighty God. We hear Starmer in voiceover: ‘From rolling out the vaccine to running the local food bank, Jesus House, like many other churches across the UK, has played a crucial role in meeting the needs of the community.’ A nice video tribute for Easter, this. Good to see churches getting some recognition. A sign, perhaps, of the inclusive national unity a Labour government would foster.

Angus Colwell

Israel says it’s ready for another war

According to my phone, I’m in Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport. Except I’m not. The Israel Defence Forces have scrambled the GPS of everyone within about an hour’s drive of the Israel-Lebanon border. The same navigation system that tells my iPhone its location is the same navigation system that Hezbollah could use to identify targets in northern Israel. They’ve been firing across the border since 7 October, and the Israelis are fed up. They’ve evacuated 80 kibbutzim, nine villages, three community centres and two Arab villages. The phrase that ministers use to describe the displaced is ‘refugees in their own country’. The offensive in Gaza is winding down, and after that – says an official – ‘we are ready to deal with Lebanon’.

Arabella Byrne

Childcare is mothercare

When I was a small child, my mother left me in the charge of an elderly neighbour so that she could write. My grandmother lived far away in Scotland and no formal childcare existed. Still, my mother wanted to write. In bald economic terms, you could say that she was trying to rejoin the workforce to boost GDP and spare the state handouts. Forty years on, she doesn’t see it like that. ‘I needed to work to feel normal again – I didn’t want to go mad,’ she says, unapologetically. Had she been in the same predicament now, she could have looked forward to the welfare reforms that promise working parents of children in England between the ages of nine months and two years up to 30 hours of funded childcare.

Freddy Gray

Jill Biden’s relentless pursuit of power

At rallies, Joe Biden often speaks after his wife. ‘My name is Joe Biden and I’m Jill’s husband,’ he begins. It’s a line he has used for years – a faux humble joke about how much more impressive she is. These days, however, it sounds more like an admission of the real pecking order. In the past week, we’ve seen the extent to which Dr Jill Biden (as she insists on being called) has taken charge of her ailing spouse’s collapsing campaign. This week, she appeared on the cover of American Vogue, looking imperious in a white tuxedo dress. ‘We will decide our future!’ shouts the quote headline. That’s a very royal ‘we’, isn’t it?

Kate Andrews

It’s payback time for voters

It won’t be much comfort to Rishi Sunak, but he’s not the only world leader being put to the electoral sword. Joe Biden will be lucky to survive the summer as the Democrats’ presidential nominee after his disastrous debate performance. Almost every opinion poll says he’s losing to Donald Trump. In France, Emmanuel Macron bet on a snap election, daring his country to vote for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Voters accepted that bet and are making the French President pay. This weekend we could see Jordan Bardella, 28, asked to become the next prime minister. Justin Trudeau looks doomed as Prime Minister of Canada. Around the world, leaders are facing a reckoning. Not so long ago, the reverse was true.

John Keiger

What the National Rally means for France’s foreign policy

The electoral turmoil in France threatens its status as a world power. Friendly nations are despairing; rivals and enemies are gloating, even circling. France is the world’s seventh-largest economic power, a prominent Nato member, a member of the UN Security Council and the EU’s leader on foreign and defence issues. It has the fifth largest strategic nuclear force and the fifth largest navy, a ‘tier one’ military and one of the highly effective ‘Nine Eyes’ intelligence services. Last year France was the world’s second largest arms exporter. It controls the third largest global undersea cables network and has the second largest coastal economic area, whose confetti territories give it a global strategic toe-hold.

Thursday

Sean Thomas

The day I met a sun priest

Palomino, Colombia I’m in a truly wonderful place: the Caribbean coast of Colombia. It’s got more bird species than most of Europe, exquisite cotton-top tamarin monkeys that hop through jungles, and one of the world’s highest coastal mountain ranges. There are empty beaches, shimmering lakes, colonial townscapes and a recent folk memory of terrible gangsters. Some male babies are largely kept in caves from birth, in the darkness, until they are nine  It also boasts several indigenous tribes, one of which – the Kogi – I had never heard of until I got here. But the more I read about them from my hammock on the beach, the more I become determined to encounter them – and to talk to one. A Kogi. Why? Because they are so strange.