After the crisis of the last three months in Italy there was a government based on a difficult coalition between the movement of five stars and the League. The two parties will have difficulty agreeing a budget, but the budget they eventually propose is likely to exceed limits imposed on Italy as a member of the [...]

As the official state visit to Luxembourg of Their Majesties King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands drew to a close, we reflected on what had taken place – what was the purpose of the visit, what was its importance? After all, The Dutch king and our own Grand Duke Henri are distant cousins, [...]

“A true patriot of his country and Europe.”This is how I was described during the speech of the new European Ambassador at the award ceremony at the European solidarity center in Gdansk, Poland. My book, Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy (Turcja: Obłęd i Melancholia), was why I was there. It is [...]

How long does it take to change someone’s mind? A lot longer than it takes to read a newspaper article, for a start. A lifetime isn’t enough, in some cases. And that’s why there has been some scepticism about Starbucks’ decision to close thousands of stores to give staff so-called “unconscious bias” [...]

Ctrl-shift-N: the wondrous keyboard shortcut to start an incognito tab in Google Chrome. You hesitantly type in your odious search, and find the porn site which in that moment you feel a magnetizing attraction [...]

People are always sniping about the cesspit that is social media, but credit where credit is due, the good people of Twitter really showed some restraint on Monday. This story started on Sunday when the Times revealed that the Tories – in a bid to compete with Labour’s growing membership and in particular their [...]

The Tories have got a youth problem and they’re going to fix it with peri-peri chicken. Not how they’d put it, but you hardly need to be a marketing whiz to work out that their latest big idea to tempt in new members – a Nando’s discount card – isn’t aimed at octogenarians in the home [...]

In November 2008 my nine-day-old son, Joshua, died in truly terrible circumstances, as a consequence of failures in his care at Furness general hospital, part of the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS foundation trust. Joshua’s death instantly turned my life upside down. But as I began to seek answers as to [...]

Imagine the indignation of Western governments if terrorists killed more than 50 Israelis on the streets of tel Aviv in one day. Yet when it comes to the killing that Israeli forces carried out on Monday at the gates of Gaza – and have been doing for the past several weeks – the silence from most western ministers [...]

In recent years, not many of us in Israel have imagined that the fate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be determined by outsiders. We always believed that our future should be discussed and negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians. Furthermore, the common view was that only the two sides should decide [...]