The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is being investigated by the environmental watchdog after Conservative ministers authorised a bee-killing pesticide that was banned by the EU.

The investigation into Defra was launched after the campaign group ClientEarth submitted a complaint to the Office for Environmental Protection, which was set up after Brexit to replace the EU’s framework for punishing environmental offences by governments in the bloc. On Monday, the OEP announced it would be investigating the emergency authorisation of a neonicotinoid pesticide in 2023 and 2024.

It said: “The investigation is seeking to determine whether there were serious failures to comply with a number of environmental laws in relation to emergency authorisations granted for the use of Cruiser SB on sugar beet seeds.

“In particular, the investigation is considering Defra’s interpretation and application of the precautionary principle and compliance with its nature conservation obligations when it considers granting emergency authorisations.”

The neonicotinoid pesticide Cruiser SB is used on sugar beet and is highly toxic to bees and has the potential to kill off populations of the insect. It is banned in the EU but the UK has provisionally agreed to its emergency use every year since leaving the bloc.

The former environment secretary Michael Gove promised in 2017 that ministers would use Brexit to stop the use of the pesticide. Instead, the EU banned all emergency authorisations of neonicotinoid pesticides while the UK government has allowed its use, one of many ways the UK has diverged from EU environmental policy since Brexit.

Prof Dave Goulson, a bee expert at the University of Sussex, has warned that one teaspoon of the chemical is enough to kill 1.25bn honeybees.

Conservative ministers authorised the pesticide for use this year, against the warnings of scientific advisers. Both the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Expert Committee on Pesticides raised concerns over this year’s emergency authorisation. Neonicotinoid pesticides can stay in the soil for years, and they taint any flowering plant which grows, meaning that bees foraging for nectar from a flower can be poisoned years after treated seeds were planted.

During the general election, the Labour party committed in its manifesto to end the authorisations of the pesticide because of its effect on bees.

Kyle Lischak, of ClientEarth, said: “Failing to take a proper precautionary approach when approving the use of pesticides is threatening our pollinators and the wider environment – and puts England even further off-track from meeting its 2030 biodiversity targets.

“This investigation also sends an important signal to government and other decision-makers: laws that protect nature – such as the habitat regulations – have to go beyond planning decisions and include other activities that could threaten nature.

“And while this investigation is under way, we are calling on the new government to support UK farmers to adopt sustainable methods of pest control that work with nature, rather than putting it at risk – as they are the custodians of so much of England’s natural environment.”

Richard Benwell, the chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link said: “This case will rightly investigate whether proper process was followed in allowing the use of banned pesticides, but if it is successful then the lessons are much wider. Scientific advice on major environmental decisions shouldn’t be swept under the carpet for political or economic expediency. We welcome Labour’s commitment to end the use of emergency authorisations for neonicotinoids, and hope the party will pay heed to the opinions of its expert advisers and the urgent need for ecological action in all its decisions, from toxic chemical use, to planning on land and at sea”.

A Defra spokesperson said: “We are at a crisis point – nature is dying across Britain. This government will change existing policies to ban the use of bee-killing pesticides to protect our vital pollinators.”

A fierce heatwave that shattered records this weekend will again grip much of the US on Monday, with more than 36 million Americans under excessive heat warnings.

The dangerous temperatures caused the death of a motorcyclist in California’s Death Valley. And they posed challenges for firefighters working in sweltering conditions to battle a series of wildfires across the state.

In Santa Barbara county, the Lake fire burned through dry grass, brush and timber over the weekend, prompting evacuations of some rural homes, including the Neverland ranch.

The heat wave came as the global temperature in June hit a record high for the 13th straight month and it marked the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5C (2.7F) warmer than pre-industrial times, the European climate service Copernicus said.

An excessive heat warning, the National Weather Service’s highest alert, was in effect Monday for portions of states including California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Idaho, while parts of the East Coast as well as states including Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi were under heat advisories.

Dozens of locations in the west and pacific north-west tied or broke previous heat records.

A high temperature of 128F (53.3 C) was recorded Saturday and Sunday at Death Valley National Park in eastern California, where a visitor died Saturday from heat exposure and another person was hospitalized, officials said.

The two visitors were part of a group of six motorcyclists riding through the Badwater Basin area amid scorching weather, the park said in a statement.

“While this is a very exciting time to experience potential world record-setting temperatures in Death Valley, we encourage visitors to choose their activities carefully, avoiding prolonged periods of time outside of an air-conditioned vehicle or building when temperatures are this high,” said Mike Reynolds, a park superintendent.

Across the desert in Nevada, Las Vegas on Sunday set a record high of 120F (48.8C).

Triple-digit temperatures were common across Oregon, where several records were toppled, including in Salem, where on Sunday it hit 103F (39.4C), topping the 99F (37.2C) mark set in 1960.

Rare heat advisories were extended even into higher elevations including around Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, with the weather service in Reno, Nevada, warning of “major heat risk impacts, even in the mountains”.

More extreme highs are in the near forecast, including possibly 130F (54.4C) around midweek at Furnace Creek, California, in Death Valley. The hottest temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was 134F (56.67C) in July 1913 in Death Valley, though some experts dispute that measurement and say the real record was 130F (54.4C), recorded there in July 2021.

History is long, and short. For many supporters of Israel, history appears to have commenced on 7 October 2023. For me, and for many others steeped in the acid bath of Palestine-Israel, history is a long brine. Conversations with ourselves begin to change in texture. In time, our arguments are prone to spoilage.

As a Palestinian American who has lived in both Gaza and the West Bank and has observed the unfettered encroachment of settlements first-hand, I’ve long been a proponent of a single shared state in Palestine-Israel – an idea that many have rejected as unworkable. Now, as we observe what scholars have described as a genocide in Palestine, the question resolves to whether it’s even thinkable for Israeli Jews and Palestinians to live as fellow citizens in a shared society.

But a two-state outcome is equally hard to envisage – Israeli settlements have made partition impossible.

What is clear is that the Palestinians, who have faced brutality for 100 years, need a resolution. And perversely, the carnage may present a new chance at redirecting history.

The war has sundered the status quo. Israel, a small country, is isolated, perhaps permanently. Mass global anti-war rallies, the international court of justice’s genocide hearings, and the international criminal court applications for arrest warrants – which put Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, in league with Slobodan Milošević – represent meaningful changes.

But they’re not enough. Truly moving forward requires policymakers to accept several basic truths they have largely refused to recognize – the most fundamental preconditions to ending the Palestinian-Israeli nightmare.

Hamas won’t be eliminated

The question of what should happen in the immediate future is clear: we need a permanent ceasefire. Gaza needs to be rebuilt and the Palestinians who live there must be permitted to return home. The territory should be free to conduct trade, its residents able to travel for study or any other reason.

Yet there is little reason to believe that this will be Gaza’s future. All along, Israel has claimed that it seeks the wholesale destruction of Hamas, a goal shared by Biden, who has said the group should be “eliminated”. But as Stephen Walt, an international relations professor at Harvard University, explained, “you’re not going to eliminate Hamas and that fraction of the Palestinian community.”

The latest ceasefire proposal, which falls short of committing Israel to a permanent halt to its activities in Gaza, seems designed to fail. A temporary cessation of hostilities, which will, judging by Israeli statements, be followed by more massacres and death in Gaza, is no ceasefire. And so we are left to consider the likelihood of a protracted Israeli presence in Gaza.

A prolonged reoccupation will see a committed Palestinian insurgency of the kind that Hamas is waging nine months into the carnage. The Israelis, conscripts or reservists with other things to do, are harried and disorganized, lacking political leadership or a vision for the future. That lack of leadership appears to be the main reason Benny Gantz – a centrist by Israeli standards, rightwing by any other – has pulled his party from Netanyahu’s government. The history in Lebanon, where Hezbollah waged a fierce and successful fight against Israeli occupation from 1985 to 2000, is instructive – the Israelis will be bled by the armed resistance if they do not withdraw.

Yet that scenario – a native, grinding insurgency – seems to be willfully ignored in policy discussions about Gaza. Instead, the conversation in Washington and Brussels seems to reject the possibility that Hamas will continue to play a role in Gaza or in the politics of Palestine-Israel generally.

Hopes for a Hamas defeat on the battlefield, followed by political capitulation, are unrealistic – like hoping that Netanyahu’s Likud, Gantz’s Israel Resilience, or Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party will have no future in the land. As Michael Milshtein, former head of Palestinian affairs in the Israeli military, explained to the Wall Street Journal: “There is no vacuum. Every place that is evacuated by the [Israeli army], Hamas fills it … Right now there is no alternative, other than Hamas.”

Indeed, the group’s battlefield success, measured by its staying power and capacity to continue to inflict meaningful losses on the occupying Israelis, carries portents for any eventual resolution. It’s a lesson the French learned in Algeria when they sought to eliminate the Algerian National Liberation Front, at enormous cost to Algerian civilians. The Americans, for their part, learned in Vietnam that the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam had more staying power than they did, even as more than 2 million civilians were killed in that war. And the Taliban in Afghanistan succeeded in defeating both American and Russian troops decades apart.

Hamas is an indigenous movement in Palestine. It draws support from civilians; its combatants can disappear and find sustenance among other residents of Gaza. Evidence shows Israel’s unbridled assault has caused an increase in support for the Islamist movement among Palestinians, enhancing its resilience.

Polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) indicated that in September 2023, Hamas was only supported by 12% of Palestinians in the West Bank and 38% in Gaza. In May of this year, support for Hamas in the West Bank had increased to 41% while in Gaza – where the polling data is less reliable due to the prolonged Israeli assault – the figure remained unchanged at 38%. On average, support for Hamas increased from 22% in September to 40% in May, with a +/-3% margin of error.

It remains the case that many Palestinians view the Islamist parties Hamas and Islamic Jihad as among the only actors committed to their right to self-defense. That right is self-evident to the Palestinians and their supporters, no matter their views of either party. As Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and former spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, told me: “People under occupation have the right to defend themselves. It is enshrined under international law.”

Hamas’s assertion of Palestine’s right to self defense – in defiance of Israel, the United States, Britain and Germany – also acts as one of the few points of leverage available to the Palestinians after decades of a failed “peace process”.

Israel’s partisans may argue that the Islamist group has signaled unyielding intent to eliminate Israel through words and actions, particularly through its deadly rampage on 7 October, and that the organization cannot be negotiated with for that reason. The argument fails on several counts. First, its corollary is that Israeli leaders cannot be negotiated with in light of their putatively genocidal actions in Palestine. Yet the Palestinians have indicated a willingness to negotiate with Israel for decades now, and they continue to do so.

Then there is Hamas’s 1988 charter, which called for the destruction of Israel – but was significantly modified in 2017 to express a willingness to pursue a state within Palestine’s 1967 borders.

The group has also repeatedly indicated interest in a long-term ceasefire with Israel, hudna in Arabic, as reported by the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Dag Henrik Tuastad, the report’s author, writes: “The purpose and details of Hamas’s hudna do not appear to differ substantially from the political positions of the [Palestine Liberation Organization] during the Camp David talks in 2000.”

Finally, there is the question of tactics. Both Hamas and Israel – and the Haganah, which preceded Israel’s army – have used terrorism to advance policy goals. But as the Irish Republican Army, which pursued its political program in part through bombings in London, and the African National Congress in South Africa have shown, the only path to eliminating terrorism is through a political agreement. “Governments and insurgents generally negotiate even though they say they never will,” the political scientists Brendan O’Leary and Andrew Silke note in their study of insurgency and terror tactics. Indeed, the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, successfully brought calm to Northern Ireland. The end of apartheid in South Africa brought one chapter of that struggle to a close.

Palestinian unification is essential

The Palestinian national movement is in a state of disarray, hollowed out and fractured by an unending “peace process”. The framework that was supposed to have seen the emergence of a Palestinian state really only compelled the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank to do the work of enforcing Israel’s occupation, even as the apartheid regime metastasized throughout the territory.

The fact of the PA’s control by Israel, and its commitment to protecting occupation forces, is a fundamental obstacle to a meaningful resolution. In every comparable struggle – in Ireland, South Africa, Bosnia and Vietnam – representative national leadership was instrumental in producing an end to the conflict.

Today one may ask: who speaks for the Palestinians? The answer is that no one does. But that wasn’t always true.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a coalition of various Palestinian movements, was founded in Cairo in 1964 to act as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, wherever they may be. Its goals changed over the years: the PLO called initially for a Palestinian state in all of Mandate Palestine, or what is now known as Palestine-Israel. It endorsed the two-state solution as part of the process that preceded the Oslo talks in 1988 after decades of armed struggle.

“The PLO is a reservoir of the Palestinian history of the resistance and the people; it represents the Palestinians as a whole. It embodies an identity and a history of struggle,” Ashrawi, of the Palestinian Legislative Council, explained. Yet the PLO is not fully representative – Hamas and Islamic Jihad are not members.

The Oslo Accords – which were not supported by all members of the PLO – were signed on 13 September 1993. The agreements formally split the representation of the Palestinians: those in exile would continue to be represented by the PLO, but those in the occupied territories would have their interests represented by the newly formed PA, a proto-institution that was, in the most generous interpretation of history, intended to precede a Palestinian national government in the state of Palestine.

Today, the PA is corrupt, led by 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, who has succeeded in resisting calls for presidential elections since 2005, when he was elected. Rather than occupying the role of liberation movement, the Abbas PA has become an administrator of paltry favors granted by the occupying authority, Israel. The corruption and impotence have led nearly 90% of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to desire Abbas’s resignation. In Ashrawi’s view, “we need elections” to reorder the national movement.

Palestinian divisions can be traced in part to the last legislative elections, in 2006, which Hamas won. Fatah, the opposition, attempted a US-backed coup, which failed. Fatah ended up in control of the PA in the West Bank; Hamas administered Gaza. The intervening years have seen repeated efforts by Palestinians to produce a representative unity government come to nothing, in part because of American and Israeli pressure designed to keep the Palestinians fragmented.

The manic, joyful killing in Gaza has united Palestinian society more than at any other time in recent history. The May PCPSR poll found that 79% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza sought either a “reconciliation or reunification” of Gaza and the West Bank or “the formation of a national unity government” that would be empowered to negotiate with Israel. For her part, Ashrawi has renewed calls for the inclusion of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the PLO. “If we want comprehensive representation, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, everybody should be a part of the PLO. Otherwise it’s not representative,” she said.

Talks to achieve unification are ongoing; China, in an effort to grasp the mantle of leadership from the United States, recently brokered talks among Hamas and Fatah representatives. That unification is essential to a just resolution to the conflict, since only a representative body can negotiate on behalf of all Palestinians.

Jewish Israelis must relinquish their privilege

Western leaders pronounce their faith in the two-state solution at every turn, despite a peace process that has been effectively dead for decades. It’s clear that Zionism – with its focus on the need for Jews to engineer and maintain a numerical majority, with superior rights, in all of Palestine-Israel – is what killed the proposal for two states. The settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which are home to 700,000 Jewish Israelis, many of them among the most extreme exponents of Zionism, have made it impossible to imagine a state on that land.

Those of us who supported the one-state solution argued the demographic reality would result in the end of Zionism and equal rights for everyone.

But we struggled for years to make our case. “I long thought the one-state solution was unworkable,” Walt, the international relations professor, said. “But I’m now beginning to wonder if … that turns out to be the only mechanism.” For a long time, equal rights in Palestine-Israel seemed like the only possible way to square geographically mixed populations and an emerging Palestinian majority with a non-expulsionist, non-exterminationist policy.

But one or two states are not the only proposals offered by those seeking to fill the breach. Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political analyst, supports a confederation – a union of countries with a central authority. “I do think Jews have a right to self-determination as a people and that Palestinians have a right to self-determination and those two are interdependent,” she explained.

Ashrawi, the Palestinian politician, lives in Birzeit, a small, historically Christian town, in the occupied West Bank. She is less focused on technical questions, and more on the fundamental principles. “We have to stay united and remain focused on the objective: a free and united Palestine for all Palestinians. We need the right to self-determination,” she said.

“I don’t worry about one state versus two states – the real issue is we have the right to live in freedom and dignity and sovereignty on our own land.”

Ashrawi dismissed the negotiations that have yielded so little for the Palestinians. “Are we going to sit down and work out borders? That’s not the issue now, frankly speaking. We have to assert our rights.”

The Palestinians will remain at war against apartheid and Jewish supremacy for as long as they exist. But what justice for the Palestinians looks like, after so much death, and so much injury, is hard to say.

In an ideal world, one in which 15,000 Palestinian children – an unfathomable number – hadn’t been killed, the war in Palestine would end through true liberation. More than 8,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons and 120 Israelis trapped in Gaza would be released and permitted to return to their families.

Equal rights in Palestine-Israel would act as the basis for a strong parliamentary democracy, safeguarding the rights of the individual in a pluralistic society. Or, in an alternative future, the confederation promoted by Scheindlin, Palestinians and Israelis would live in a country grounded in “two people’s self-determination, [each claiming] a territorial environment where they feel culturally expressive of who they are”, as she described her vision.

But whatever the configuration, Jewish Israelis must relinquish the extraordinary privilege they’ve secured for themselves in Palestine-Israel. They cannot be counted on to do so without massive external pressure, however. As the journalist Peter Beinart said to me, South Africa didn’t change until the “status quo [became] untenable for the elites”.

The last nine months have changed many of us, making ideas that once seemed attainable feel distant, unreal. It seems reasonable to believe that the horror meted out by Israelis, orders of magnitude larger than the crimes perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October – with the overwhelming support of their society – has been inscribed for ever upon the hearts of many people.

Diana Buttu, a former Oslo negotiator who lives in Haifa, described her physical insecurity, the personal relationships that have curdled, and the casual incitement to genocide by her Jewish neighbors. “Everywhere you go, you see these signs that say ‘Finish them’.”

“When you talk to people about what the army is doing they shrug it off … 15,000 kids killed, and this is the response: ‘Eh, it’s the price.’”

So many young men have posted so many videos of themselves committing crimes of war that they are unavoidable. So many young people – children – have sabotaged efforts to deliver flour to Gaza.

It is impossible to imagine a future in which Palestinians and Israelis live side-by-side in a single state or a confederation without some reckoning. For my own part, I cannot conceive of a future that does not require the reconstruction of the Israeli left in a new form – anti-Zionist, honest about history, aligned with the global movement for Palestinian rights. It is simply the precondition for working together, towards any outcome.

The showy parades in Tel Aviv that preceded October 2023, demanding democracy for Jewish Israelis alone, have nothing to do with Palestinian liberation, and Palestinians regarded them with aloofness or scorn. The vast majority of the families of Israeli soldiers and civilians who are protesting the Netanyahu government are not calling for an end to the genocide, or for Palestinian freedom. There is little common cause there; we do not see our humanity reflected in their eyes. Many Palestinians watched the celebrations that attended the Nuseirat massacre – four Israeli hostages were freed, measured against the murder of nearly three hundred Palestinians – in shock, overwhelmed by feelings of total revulsion.

Yet Palestinians and Israelis are not unique. Rwanda and South Africa, where genocide and apartheid were perpetrated, have sought a return to life through truth and reconciliation commissions, which seek to identify harm and repair it.

As O’Leary, the political scientist, noted to me, this requires, first, a brand-new political order. “The empirical pattern is that a regime that is not defeated does not concede a comprehensive truth commission, followed by legal processes in which state officials are … sentenced.”

And so hope for the future, such as it is, is fixed in a vision that requires the end of Jewish supremacy in Palestine.

In reality, we are light years from truth and reconciliation commissions, a harrowing effort in the best of times. Today we are Rwanda in 1994, bathing still in frothy blood.

The effective ban on onshore windfarms has been dropped by the newly elected Labour government, in news that has delighted environmental and energy experts.

The ban was caused by two footnotes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the rules which govern the building of homes and infrastructure.

These footnotes only applied to onshore wind, no other type of infrastructure, and required such strong proof that there was no opposition from the local community they made building turbines impossible, given there is nearly always some local resistance to any building proposal.

In Labour’s proposed new NPPF, these footnotes have been deleted in their entirety, meaning that onshore wind projects are now on an even footing with all other forms of infrastructure. The change will officially come into force when parliament resumes on 18 July.

The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced the change in a speech on Monday, saying she would end the “absurd” ban, arguing that decisions should be “taken nationally, not locally”.

Officials outlined the move in a policy statement, writing: “Delivering our clean power mission will help boost Britain’s energy independence, save money on energy bills, support high-skilled jobs and tackle the climate crisis.

“We are therefore committed to doubling onshore wind energy by 2030. That means immediately removing the de facto ban on onshore wind in England, in place since 2015. We are revising planning policy to place onshore wind on the same footing as other energy development in the National Planning Policy Framework.”

Last September, the then communities secretary, Michael Gove, said the de facto ban would be lifted – as rules put in place by David Cameron in 2015 decreed that a single planning objection could scupper an onshore wind project.

However, the offending paragraphs in the NPPF footnote remained, making building new projects almost impossible. Analysis of the government’s renewable energy planning database found that no applications for new onshore wind projects were submitted after Gove’s announcement.

The end of the ban was promised in Labour election manifesto and trailed by the new energy secretary, Ed Miliband, when he was in opposition, but campaigners were surprised by the speed at which it has been implemented.

Mike Childs, the head of science, policy and research at Friends of the Earth, said: “By ending the onshore wind ban in England, Labour is making an important stride towards delivering on our climate goals, while also paving the way for lower bills, as renewables produce some of the cheapest and cleanest energy available.

“In April, research by Friends of the Earth found that utilising less than 3% of land in England for onshore wind and solar could produce 13 times more clean energy that now generated – enough to power all households in England twice over. By harnessing the country’s vast renewable power potential, the new government is staking its claim as a global leader in the green energy transition.”

Sam Richards, the chief executive of the pro-growth campaign group Britain Remade and a former environmental adviser to No 10, said: “The only way we are going to see the growth Britain desperately needs is if we make it significantly easier to build the homes and the new sources of clean energy needed to reach net zero.

“During the election Labour promised to fix our outdated and sclerotic planning system to just that, and with this speech the new chancellor is hitting the ground running.

“Lifting the ban on new onshore windfarms in England is something Britain Remade has been campaigning for since we launched, so I am delighted Rachel Reeves has dropped the ban so soon after the election.”

Dr Doug Parr, the Greenpeace chief scientist, added: “As the recent gas price crisis shows, this ban was self-defeating for energy security, costly, and lost opportunities to cut emissions. The end of the ban is well overdue.”

It felt like a deeply symbolic, even cathartic, moment on Saturday lunchtime as, on take-off from Stansted, the pilot carrying the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, banked the government plane with the union jack livery sharply leftwards across the sodden and half-occluded fields of Essex and towards Europe.

For the first of what are likely to be innumerable overseas trips, Lammy had chosen Destination Europe, and Operation Reset. It was intended quite literally to be a flying start as he hurtled from his first cabinet meeting down the M11 and on to a flight to Berlin, Stockholm and Bydgoszcz, close to the pastoral family home of the Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski.

The lightning weekend trip is only the first leg of what may prove to be a long and painful journey reconstructing a relationship with Europe after the eight fractious years of Brexit, albeit a relationship with boundaries. For although Lammy in Berlin said he wanted to draw a line under the Brexit years, Labour remains rigidly committed to staying outside the EU, the single market and the customs union. Britain is returning to Europe, but as a changed country seeking cooperation, not union.

It is a delicate operation, involving complex trade-offs, and it may not work. In Brussels at a time of rising European nationalism, there will be fears that it cannot be perceived to be granting any concessions to a country that fled the EU. In the UK, the Conservatives, anxious for redemption as Boris Johnson has already written, accuse Labour of taking the UK back down the road to EU “serfdom”.

The trip, planned in opposition for weeks in great secrecy but with the knowledge of the outgoing foreign secretary David Cameron, took Lammy to meet what may become three of his most influential European partners: Annalena Baerbock, the German foreign minister; Sikorski; and the Swedish foreign minister, Tobias Billström.

Between the visits, Lammy squeezed in 16 introductory phone calls with EU and world diplomats including Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, and Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief. Paris would have been another stop-off but for the fact that French politics, in the midst of National Assembly elections, is in what may charitably be described as a state of flux.

It did not escape UK officials that after years as the sick man of Europe, the opportunity arises for the country to suddenly look like an oasis of stability, led by a government with at least four years in power and an impregnable majority.

Lammy aimed to come not just with warm words, but with the outline of a plan for an EU-UK security pact. That plan, carefully hatched in opposition, and in some ways reviving ideas that fell by the wayside in the original Brexit negotiations, is more ambitious and wide-ranging than commonly recognised, since security is being defined by the Lammy team in its broadest sense, to cover not just defence, but the web of issues that make up modern-day security, from the climate crisis to energy, pandemics, cyber, investment strategies and critical minerals.

He came away from his conversations with Sikorski and Baerbock feeling that there was an enthusiasm to form a new cooperation agreement, although exactly how formal that agreement, and whether it has legal elements, are for future discussion. With EU states worrying about what the possible US presidency of Donald Trump might mean for the Nato umbrella and US contributions to the defence of Europe, the return of the British, with their defence expertise, could at least offer a form of reassurance.

Poland, with its high levels of defence spending, Germany, with its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Sweden with its newly minted membership of Nato seemed obvious places to start.

In what he conceded was a “tough geopolitical moment”, Lammy said it was important not to confuse disagreements between mature democracies with the threats posed by authoritarian regimes.

He then went into an unscripted warning to China, saying: “I am concerned when I see Iranian drones turning up in Ukraine. I am concerned when I see shells from North Korea being used here on European soil. And of course I’m concerned with the partnership that I see Russia brokering across those authoritarian states. I think that China should be very careful about deepening those partnerships over the coming weeks and months.”

Lammy and his team face a steep learning curve as they navigate the protocols of ensuring that convoys arrive on time, keeping his close protection team near, providing the right diplomatic gifts, thanking the local embassy team, feeding the frequent demands of Foreign Office official social media, and ensuring he is not photographed in the rain, or “doing a Sunak”.

There is little downtime. Ten minutes watching the England v Switzerland Euro 2024 quarter-final with Baerbock was followed by a rush back to the hotel for a briefing on Gibraltar, and then a chance to glimpse England win on penalties, as well as to have a hour with his son who, by chance, was also in Berlin, Interrailing after completing his A-levels.

But Lammy is determined that his European tour is part of a wider UK’s reconnection with the world. In his cavernous office in King Charles Street, hours after being made foreign secretary, he reflected on how, as a descendant of enslaved people, he felt he had a special responsibility to find a new voice for Britain when speaking to the global south.

“These are nations that are just vastly different to where they sat a few years ago. Much of the global south can – we saw this during the vaccine episode – look to us for help. They didn’t get the help then, so they turned to India or China.

“And the truth is that there’s got to be a tonal shift. And we’ve got to recognise that it’s a competitive world.”

It will require a different, less blustering approach. “What I have learned is about the importance of listening, not just preaching,” Lammy said. “Diplomacy is also about listening. And to listen, you have to really hear, and I’m not sure we’ve been good at that over the last few years and we’ve got to get back to it.”

The ferry ride takes just five minutes, crossing the Sound from the island of Tjörn to the smaller, car-free Härön. Red-roofed wooden houses, their walls brightly painted in ochre, white or Swedish red, stand grouped along the shoreline, with rounded bluffs of rock rising behind them. Boats nudge against jetties, places to plunge into the sea after the heat of the sauna.

Smooth outcrops of granite knuckle through the thin soil and, with few garden boundaries here, the island’s wild plants – among them the dusky purple sand leek – mingle with the cultivated. Our path leaves the strand for cow pastures, before we reach boardwalks that brush past citrus-scented bog myrtle. Then the way climbs on to high ground of bare rock, heather and juniper scrub, with multi-stemmed Scots pines, wind-pruned into dynamic shapes.

It is a place of contrasts, a mixture of dry ground and bog, creating varied habitats: vast curving slabs of rock where thin grasses and flowers sprout along the cracks or in hollows; wet places bright with bog cotton and silver lichen; the occasional quiet lochan, cradled in the land, its calm surface holding bog bean and water lilies.

Most of Härön – about 40 miles north-west of Gothenburg – became a nature reserve in 1997, and the last remaining farmstead, called Ängen, is traditionally managed through a cycle of hay-cutting, arable and grazing. The narrow fields that fill a long, thin valley have only ever been enhanced with seaweed or natural fertiliser. Poppies grow among tall cereal crops and the margins are full of wildflowers: agrimony, lady’s bedstraw, St John’s wort and hare’s foot clover. Threatened arable weeds such as corncockle have been planted in the fields and verges using local seed. In the woodland edges, we see rampion and the squat towers of pyramidal bugle.

The hay meadows of Ängen are nearing cutting time, but there are still orchids flowering among the yellow rattle-suppressed grasses. Swallows swoop from their cupped nests in the barn and small skipper butterflies dart between betony and dandelions. It is a place to slow down. Later that night, I am lulled to sleep by the slow slap of water through an open window.

Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary

It is 5.15am and I am walking down my street, feeling smug. The buildings are bathed in peachy dawn light. “Win the morning and you win the day,” suggests productivity guru Tim Ferriss. The prize is within my sights: an oat-milk latte, my reward for getting up ridiculously early.

The trains have not started running yet and the silence seems to magnify hitherto inaudible sounds. There is a mysterious squawk of gulls. I live in Camden, north-west London, many miles from the seaside. I have certainly never heard them here before.

I note that my neighbours’ gas meter is emitting a weird hum; should I ring their doorbell to let them know? Probably not. On to the deserted six-lane high street where supermarket delivery vans and the occasional bus are the only signs of life.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of being up and about so early is that it unmasks the lie that London is a 24-hour city. Corner shops that I had assumed were open all night are locked behind graffiti-sprayed shutters. Aha, what is this I see? A human. He is listing from side to side, clearly heading home after a big night.

I pass the coach stop for the airport where three shift workers, discernible by lanyards and their lack of luggage, are staring glassily into the empty road. They are not exactly radiating winning-the-day exuberance.

Further along, outside the 24-hour gym, a couple clad in matching grey Lycra are huddled over a phone screen. Perhaps they are synchronising their workouts? I bid them a cheery good morning, but they scuttle inside like startled mice.

My mood starts to plummet. There is no coffee to be had at any of the eight shuttered cafes I pass, so I head for a patch of green space to meditate. En route, I realise a hooded man has fallen into step with me. Freaked out, I decide to head for home. Is the man following me? I look back. He is not. Lack of sleep is making me unhinged.

Why am I doing this? Because, in an attempt to become one of the elite superbeings who are members of the 5am club, I am trying a week of very early starts. Being an early bird is increasingly popular among the rich and famous, with everyone from Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Aniston and the Kardashians to tech bros such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey subscribing to the club. So do Anna Wintour and Michelle Obama. Gwyneth Paltrow is a longtime member, sharing on Instagram how she rises at 5am for a 30-minute tongue scrape and Ayurvedic oil pull (me neither), before settling down for 20 minutes of transcendental meditation, followed by a dance workout devised by her friend, the fitness guru Tracy Anderson.

The extreme early start as a cultural phenomenon first exploded on social media, inspired by Robin Sharma’s book The 5am Club and other hashtag-friendly titles such as The Miracle Morning and Power Hour. Leadership guru Sharma’s catchphrase “Own your morning, elevate your life” has inspired legions of smug people – sorry, highly disciplined individuals – to share their impressive #5amClub routines (17.5m TikTok posts).

To a sceptic, there is a degree of magical thinking to much of this. If you can just do this one thing – get out of bed while others snooze – you will have time to get fit, eat healthily and achieve all your goals. Still, after scrolling through a tsunami of turmeric lattes, gratitude journals and sun salutations, I am sufficiently inspired to try it.

Although I am not what you would call a natural lark, my relationship with time was transformed during the pandemic, in common with many others. With nowhere to go in the evening, staying up late became pointless. Gradually, my wake-up time got earlier. As a photographer, rising at dawn to catch the best light makes a lot of sense too.

By January 2021, I had begun a lockdown project of climbing to the top of Primrose Hill near Camden Town to photograph the sunrise. Inscribed on the viewing platform are words by the poet William Blake. “I have conversed with the spiritual Sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill.” There was something about that pale violet stillness, as I stood alone with other sunrise watchers, that felt as close to a sacred experience as I had ever witnessed in London.

The early rising habit stuck, but not the brisk walks. Ordinarily, I get up at 6.30am without an alarm. I am not at my best at this hour. I mainline instant coffee and doomscroll for 90 minutes, and then it is time to get ready for work. Could rising at 5am and following a structured routine make me productive and focused? I commit to doing it for a week.

The night before I begin, I go to bed at 9pm with Sharma’s audiobook and soon fall into an unusually deep sleep. At 4.50am, my alarm, set to Arcade Fire’s Wake Up, blares out of my phone at top volume. There is a thud from above: I have accidentally recruited my neighbour into the 5am club.

I make coffee and slump on the sofa. But then I remember this isn’t allowed. I must instead follow the book’s 20/20/20 formula. From 5am to 5.20am you do some form of vigorous exercise; 5.20am to 5.40am is for meditation and journaling; and from 5.40am to 6am, it is time for reading or learning. I feel terrible, despite having had eight hours’ sleep.

The gym is out of the question, and luckily it is closed. I decide to do some meditation, which is lovely, but 40 minutes later I have pretty much dozed off. I feel exactly like you do when you have got up early to catch a flight, except I am not going anywhere. There is a sense of anticlimax, and also of raging hunger. Somehow, my appetite regulation has gone haywire. I have porridge, then toast, then two pancakes, then a nut bar. By lunchtime, I feel queasy and also freezing cold. The day passes in an unproductive fog.

Day two is much worse, because, for some reason, I have a terrible night’s sleep. Groggily, I get out of bed and stumble into the kitchen to put on the kettle. In the process I knock over an open box of porridge oats. I unleash a stream of Glaswegian swear words and then hear a door slamming above me. Oh dear.

Onwards to the yoga mat. But downward-facing dog leaves me feeling dizzy, so I stop. I move on to journaling, but all I can think of to write is: “I want to go back to bed, please.” I do a quick round of Duolingo to tick the “learning” box, but that lurid-green owl isn’t an ideal dawn companion.

It is now 6am and the whole day stretches ahead of me. But I can barely summon the energy to get off the sofa, let alone get on the tube and go to the office.

I attempt to do some work; the day passes slowly, but then I have a strange sense of anticipation that something lovely lies ahead. What is it, I wonder. Then it dawns on me – only five hours and I can go to bed.

Day three is equally dismal, mostly because I sleep in until 8am and then remember I have to go to a meeting on the other side of town. Gratitude journaling will have to wait.

Why is this so hard? I put the question to Russell Foster, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at Oxford University. But he wants to know why I would want to sign up for the 5am club in the first place. To say he is scathing about the fetishisation of the early start would be an understatement. “There’s nothing intrinsically important about getting up at 5am. It’s just the ghastly smugness of the early start. Benjamin Franklin was the one who started it all when he said, ‘Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’ and it’s been going on ever since. It goes back to the Protestant work ethic – work is good and if you can’t or won’t work, that is, by definition, bad. Not sleeping is seen as worthy and productive.”

There is plenty of research indicating that getting up early can make you happier, and even eat more healthily. However, Foster points out a major pitfall. “In order to get enough sleep, many people would need to go to bed at 9pm. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t able to do that because we have all this stuff we need to do, whether that be helping kids with homework or putting a load of washing on. So, the danger is, we don’t actually get to bed when we should, and another factor is that other people are likely to still be making a noise around you, so how are you going to get to sleep?”

He also points out that the most enthusiastic exponents of these regimes are people who can afford to outsource life admin. “These productivity gurus and entrepreneurs have money to pay people to do everything. Imposing this schedule on other people is punitive and it’s also boastful: ‘Oh, aren’t I a great person; why don’t you become more like me?’ Truth is, most of us can’t afford to.”

Foster raises some excellent points, but I am still keen to master an earlier wake-up. Will it get easier over time? Sleep psychotherapist Heather Darwall-Smith isn’t so sure. “We each have a chronotype that determines our body clock. Everyone knows there are people who are morning larks and others who are night owls,” she says. “But actually, most people fall somewhere in between. So, there will be people who can go to bed at 10pm and wake naturally at 5am, and it’s a routine that fits with their chronotype. But many of us are not like that. And let’s not forget, there are lots of people who have a 5am wake-up imposed on them by their work shifts.”

By day four of my experiment, I am grumpy and miserable. I’ve had to cancel a trip to the pub because, newsflash, an evening of merlot and a dawn wake-up isn’t a good combination. I’ve also become borderline insufferable. “Late night?” I ask a colleague who is yawning at the advanced hour of 11am. I really want to mention that I’ve been up for SIX WHOLE HOURS, but wisely desist. People might get jealous of my self-discipline.

Day five is a new low. I sleep in until 5.43am and then eat a salted caramel Magnum for breakfast to compensate for missing out on the pub. Morning six is more successful. I have a deadline looming and welcome the extra time to get ahead. Day seven is the fruitless coffee odyssey and I realise that going outside definitely does make me feel a lot more energised and upbeat.

I decide to talk to some non-celebs who have made the 5am club work for them. Jenny Wilson, a colour therapist, gets up every morning at 4.55 and, while the rest of her family sleeps, has a quick shower before creeping into the spare room to start her day.

“I call it my bewitching hour because as long as I have this time for myself, the rest of the day falls into place like magic,” she says. Her ritual is always the same – 30 minutes of yoga followed by 20 minutes of meditation, ending with speaking her intentions for the day aloud. “After that, I’m ready to make breakfast for my children and get on with my life. It means I start the day with a feeling of accomplishment, that I’ve already done amazing things before anybody else is up.”

Probation officer Quynh Nguyen-Dang has been following an early morning routine since January, after reading The 5am Club. Every morning, she sets her smartwatch to vibrate at 4.30 and then again at 5. She puts on her workout gear, gets in her car and drives to her local gym to do 30 minutes of cardio. “It’s a beautiful drive, so peaceful. The other morning I stopped to admire the pink candyfloss clouds. When I’m in the gym, I often send emails and update social media for my fashion business side hustle while I’m pedalling away. There are only so many hours in the day and this is a great way to get ahead. It’s like a secret society. I see the same group of women there every morning. Afterwards, we’re all lining up at the mirror, doing our hair and getting ready for work.”

However, adopting such a punitive regime comes at a cost. “I turn into a pumpkin at 9pm,” she says. “I feel bad if I have to say no to seeing people after work but on the weekends I do tend to sleep later.”

On day eight, I wake up at 5.04am without an alarm. The morning beckons. Do I bound out of bed to seize the day? I do not. I decide to return to my usual wake-up time, only now with a renewed focus. The week hasn’t been a total waste of time – far from it. What it has made me realise is how much time I was wasting before, particularly in the morning. It’s not when you get up that matters – it’s how you choose to use the precious minutes you have that really counts.

The world has baked for 12 consecutive months in temperatures 1.5C (2.7F) greater than their average before the fossil fuel era, new data shows.

Temperatures between July 2023 and June 2024 were the highest on record, scientists found, creating a year-long stretch in which the Earth was 1.64C hotter than in preindustrial times.

The findings do not mean world leaders have already failed to honour their promises to stop the planet heating 1.5C by the end of the century – a target that is measured in decadal averages rather than single years – but that scorching heat will have exposed more people to violent weather. A sustained rise in temperatures above this level also increases the risk of uncertain but catastrophic tipping points.

Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which analysed the data, said the results were not a statistical oddity but a “large and continuing shift” in the climate.

“Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm,” he said. “This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.”

Copernicus, a scientific organisation that belongs to the EU’s space programme, uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to track key climate metrics. It found June 2024 was hotter than any other June on record and was the 12th month in a row with temperatures 1.5C greater than their average between 1850 and 1900.

Because temperatures in some months had “relatively small margins” above 1.5C, the scientists said, datasets from other climate agencies may not confirm the 12-month temperature streak.

Whether pumped out the chimney of a coal-burning power plant or ejected from the exhaust pipe of a passenger plane, each carbon molecule clogging the Earth’s atmosphere traps heat and warps weather. The hotter the planet gets, the less people and ecosystems can adapt.

“This is not good news at all,” said Aditi Mukherji, a director at research institute CGIAR and co-author of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. “We know that extreme events increase with every increment of global warming – and at 1.5C, we witnessed some of the hottest extremes this year.”

Some ecosystems are more vulnerable than others. In its latest review of the science, the IPCC found that 1.5C of warming will kill off 70-90% of tropical coral reefs, while warming of 2C will wipe them out almost entirely.

A Guardian survey of hundreds of IPCC authors this year found three-quarters expect the planet to heat by at least 2.5C by 2100, with about half of the scientists expecting temperatures above 3C. The increments sound small but can mean the difference between widespread human suffering and “semi-dystopian” futures.

Mukherji compared 1C of global heating to a mild fever and 1.5C a medium-to-high grade fever. “Now imagine a human body with [that] temperature for years. Will that person function normally any more?”

“That’s currently our Earth system,” she added. “It is a crisis.”

François Gemenne, an IPCC author and director of the Hugo Observatory at the University of Liège, said the climate crisis is not a binary issue. “It is not 1.5C or death – every 0.1C matters a great deal because we’re talking about global average temperatures, which translate into massive temperature gaps locally.”

Even in a best-case scenario, he said, people need to prepare for a warmer world and “beef up” response plans. “Adaptation is not an admission that our current efforts are useless.”

A visitor to Death Valley national park died Sunday from heat exposure and another person was hospitalized as the temperature reached 128F (53.3C) in eastern California, officials said.

The two visitors were part of a group of six motorcyclists riding through the Badwater Basin area amid scorching weather, the park said.

The person who died was not identified. The other motorcyclist was hospitalized in Las Vegas for “severe heat illness”, the statement said. The other four members of the party were treated at the scene.

“High heat like this can pose real threats to your health,” said park superintendent Mike Reynolds.

“Besides not being able to cool down while riding due to high ambient air temperatures, experiencing Death Valley by motorcycle when it is this hot is further challenged by the necessary heavy safety gear worn to reduce injuries during an accident,” Reynolds said.

The death comes as a long-running heatwave has shattered temperature records across the US.

An excessive heat warning – the National Weather Service’s (NWS) highest alert – was in effect for about 36 million people, or about 10% of the US population, said NWS meteorologist Bryan Jackson. Dozens of locations in the west and Pacific north-west were expected to tie or break previous heat records, he said.

That was certainly the case over the weekend: many areas in northern California surpassed 110F (43.3C), with the city of Redding topping out at a record 119F (48.3C). Phoenix set a new daily record Sunday for the warmest low temperature: it never got below 92F (33.3C).

Triple-digit temperatures were common across Oregon, where several records were toppled – including in Salem, where on Sunday it hit 103F (39.4C), topping the 99F (37.2C) mark set in 1960.

Rare heat advisories were extended even into higher elevations including around Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, with the weather service in Reno, Nevada, warning of “major heat risk impacts, even in the mountains”.

On the more humid east coast, temperatures above 100F were widespread, while storm Beryl is expected to strengthen back into a hurricane and hit east Texas Monday.

The Associated Press contributed reporting