Inside the world of the extraordinary man who ruled Number 10
He was the UK s top civil servant. Now Jeremy Heywood s widow has written a biography, serialised in The Telegraph over the next three days
30 January 2021 • 6:00am
‘You always need someone in government to deal with the mess in the middle’. Here, Heywood with Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011
Credit: Tom Stoddart
Jeremy Heywood was the most powerful man in Downing Street and Whitehall you have probably never heard of. Ending up as cabinet secretary, he worked extremely closely with four successive prime ministers – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. All four paid glowing tributes at his memorial service. He died of lung cancer in 2018, aged 56, working almost to the last.
When Flight MH370 disappeared, conspiracy theories quickly emerged
Credit: AP Images
Nobody disputes the initial facts – not even Florence de Changy, a French journalist whose new book on the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is about to revive the greatest mystery in aviation history.
At 00:42 on 8 March 2014, MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing. On board the Boeing 777 were two pilots, 10 flight attendants and 227 passengers of 14 different nationalities. They included Chinese labourers and package- holiday tourists going home, a group of calligraphers, a stuntman who was working on a new Netflix series, and 20 employees of a US electronics company. Five were children.
Wuhan one year on: The city that appears safe from Covid - but at what cost?
One year after the Covid-19 pandemic erupted, our China Correspondent returns to Wuhan and asks whether all is really as it seems
23 January 2021 • 6:00am
Two uniformed guards wielding thermometers stand at the public entrance of what was once Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, and watch as I fumble with my phone.
To gain entry, they tell me to scan a QR code and register my details on a contact-tracing platform. But my signal is weak and an error message flashes on my screen. I show it to them. ‘It’s not working.’