Diary – 21 July 2016

These days, you only need to turn your back for five minutes and you’ve missed another horror. The Turkish coup may have been foiled by incompetence, Facetime and people power, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is seizing the chance to consolidate his increasingly authoritarian regime. My friend Ayse Kadioglu, one of Turkey’s brave, embattled liberal intellectuals, compares the bombing of the parliament building in Ankara to the Reichstag fire of 1933 — not in the sense of being a put-up job, but as a pretext for strangling democracy.