Young, progressive and relatable, the former prime minister of New Zealand tried to do politics differently. But six years into power, she dramatically resigned. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, she explains why

• Read an exclusive extract from Ardern’s memoir

In 2022, a few months before she quit as prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern was standing at the sink in the toilets in Auckland airport, washing her hands, when a woman came up to her and leaned in. She was so close that Ardern could feel the heat from her skin. “I just wanted to say thank you,” the woman said. “Thanks for ruining the country.” She turned and left, leaving Ardern “standing there as if I were a high-schooler who’d just been razed”.

The incident was deeply shocking. Ardern had been re-elected in a historic landslide two years before. She enjoyed conversation and debate; she liked being the kind of leader who wasn’t sealed off from the rest of the population. But this, says Ardern, “felt like something new. It was the tenor of the woman’s voice, the way she’d stood so close, the way her seething, nonspecific rage felt not only unpredictable but incongruous to the situation … What was happening?”

Sarah Roberts is a grandmother and global record holder but only took it up after a parkrun eight years ago

Along a sun-dappled canal towpath in picturesque Hertfordshire countryside, a grey-brown bob rises and falls with the effortless bounce of a lithe, spectacled figure gliding her way past dog-walkers and afternoon ramblers.

There is a watch – one of those smart-technology devices capable of producing all sorts of unnecessary metrics – on Sarah Roberts’s wrist, but she has forgotten to switch it on. Roberts, a grandmother of five, tends not to take note of such things.

Almost half of young people would prefer a world without the internet. We are haunted by the feeling that it has robbed us of something vital

A video went viral on X a few months ago that I can’t stop watching. It’s 2003: the band that later becomes MGMT are performing their song Kids to their peers, years before they become a pop sensation, in a dusty quad at Wesleyan University, Connecticut. Social media doesn’t exist yet. There is something about the way people look and behave and inhabit the space that tugs at my heartstrings and fills me with nostalgia. No one is dressed that well; the camera zooms unsteadily to capture the crowd’s awkwardness, slumped shoulders and arrhythmic bopping. Beyond the footage we’re watching, no one seems to be filming.

I was only four when the video was filmed, so why does watching it make me feel as if I’ve lost a whole world? A recent survey suggests I’m not alone – that almost half of young people would prefer a world without the internet. If anything, I expected a higher percentage. This doesn’t mean my generation really would like to reverse everything that’s happened in the last few decades, but there’s clearly something we feel we’re missing out on that older people have had, and we attribute it to the internet – or at least to its current form, dominated as it is by social media.

Isabel Brooks is a freelance writer

Silva, 30, who works in theatre, meets Megan, 30, an artist manager

What were you hoping for?
To meet the mother of my future five daughters: Raven, Phoenix, Ocean, River and Amethyst. Failing that, a dating horror story to regale friends with at parties.

It took a viewing of the 2018 film Beautiful Boy, about a father and his addict son, for me to see that my relationship had become damagingly codependent

Two summers ago, I met a man on a dating app who would become my boyfriend. The red flags were there from the start, but I ignored them all. When I stayed at his, he didn’t have a towel to offer me, and he never changed his sheets. It became obvious that he didn’t know how to look after himself. Even though, in reality, he could survive without me (similar to how a teenage boy would survive on his own, eating burgers in bed), I felt like, if I wasn’t there to buy groceries, cook and clean, he might die. He would disappear for days, on a drink- or drugs-fuelled bender, and I’d assume he’d overdosed in a basement somewhere. I lived in fear that something terrible would happen to him. I became his boyfriend and his caregiver.

This was a familiar role for me: I’d done it in all my previous relationships. I needed to be needed. If the person I was dating didn’t need me, then what value did I have? I found safety in taking care of someone. This started as a family dynamic: as the eldest child, I had to look out for my younger brothers, and learned to overlook my own needs. Then, when I was 14, my girlfriend died in a drug-related car accident. My therapist helped me to see the connection; that because I couldn’t save her, I sought romantic relationships with men or women I thought I could save instead.

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MoD document expected to highlight dangers posed by Russia and China, and shortfall in UK troop numbers

Britain is facing “a new era of threat” with drones, artificial intelligence and other technologies changing the nature of warfare more fundamentally than at any other point in history, the government’s strategic defence review is expected to conclude on Monday.

The 130-page document written by three advisers to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, will warn of the “immediate and pressing” danger posed by Russia and is expected to try to draw heavily on lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.

Biometrics app not ready, meaning travellers through Port of Dover will have to exit vehicles to have identity verified

British citizens who travel frequently to the EU face having their fingerprints individually checked each time they cross the border into the Schengen area because of delays in developing an app to verify biometrics digitally, it has emerged.

It will be “business as usual” this summer but “a big change” in travel will be phased in from November, Doug Bannister, the chief executive of the Port of Dover has said.

London transport body says allowing Bpas adverts on its network could bring police and City Hall into disrepute

Transport for London has blocked adverts that urge people to lobby their MPs to vote to decriminalise abortion from running on its network because it claims they could bring the police and City Hall into disrepute.

Parliament is expected to vote on whether to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales in the coming weeks, with amendments tabled to the crime and policing bill seeking to change the law.

Threat by Israel Katz comes as UN warns that the entire population of Gaza is at risk of famine

• Gaza is hungriest place on Earth, warns UN

The Times of Israel reports that today, a convoy of tractors that set out from kibbutzim across Israel has arrived at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, calling for the return of hostages held in Gaza.

Organised by the Kibbutz Movement and the Hostages Families Forum, it marks more than 600 days since the hostages were taken by Hamas in October 2023.