As a bodyguard in Israel’s elite Shin Bet unit in the 1990s, says Ami Dror in The New Statesman, I accompanied Benjamin Netanyahu to the “world’s power centres” to meet popes, prime ministers and presidents. Now his politics are “closer to fascism”, it’s hard to remember that back then, Netanyahu was essentially a liberal. The most successful politicians of the era were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and you could tell he “wanted to be like them”. In my pocket, I kept a small book listing potential assassins to look out for. Among them was the extreme religious right-winger Itamar Ben-Gvir. Today, Ben-Gvir is Israel’s national security minister.

Netanyahu was the youngest prime minister in Israel’s history, and he always had incredible confidence. I remember Clinton, worn down by hours of Netanyahu’s “energetic brinkmanship” during negotiations over the Oslo Accords, saying: “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?” I also remember Netanyahu – who at the time was prepared to give away “swathes of territory to the Palestinians” – racing around in a golf buggy with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. There was only one small sign of the man Netanyahu has become. I escorted him and his wife Sara to expensive restaurants, where they liked to eat late at night. The first time they left without paying the bill, the owners generally didn’t mind. The second time they were puzzled. The third time they would get angry, sometimes “literally chasing them” out of the restaurant. I remember wondering, why didn’t he pay? He could have afforded to. Only decades later did I realise I had been watching “a little thief in the process of becoming a big gangster”.

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The rest of this week’s heroes and villains – including the digger driver responsible for the extremely low-speed police chase pictured above, and the 84-year-old British pensioner who goes on a 500-mile horseback ride every summer – are for paying subscribers only. To read them, and go back to receiving the newsletter in full every day, please take out a subscription.

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