The death of two soldiers from 3 Yorks in a “green-on-blue” incident at the weekend has greatly saddened the garrison town of Warminster where they were based.

The Defence Secretary discussed the vetting of members of the Afghan security forces during a recent visit to Kabul.

It will never be perfect but we must reduce the risks posed to our troops from those they are training and mentoring as far as we can.

Let us hope that the last few days of 3 Yorks’ deployment pass without further incident.

Great news that foreign HGVs will have to pay to use UK roads just as our hauliers have to pay on the continent.

It is a scandal that the competitive dis-advantage of indigenous hauliers means they are being priced out of shifting goods in the UK.

How can it be right that road-churning lorries from the continent can benefit from highways maintained by road taxes to which they do not contribute?

The English Baccalaureate (EBacc) unveiled this week as a replacement for GCSEs is a great step forward in secondary education that will put us back on track with other countries.

Those of us of a certain age with children now in the system have observed how things have changed since we took O levels.

Employers too have been saying that the current system of GCSEs fails to equip future employees with what they need and is incapable of discriminating between achievement levels sufficiently well.

The new system announced by Michael Gove will lift the bar and rely less on the modularised continuous assessment and a scoring mechanism which appears to disadvantage some children.

The publication of topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge by a French magazine is rightly being censured.

Taking and publishing images of this sort without consent is plain wrong, whoever the subject is.

We await the outcome of the Leveson inquiry into press behaviour with much interest.

A free press is a necessary part of civil society but it implies responsibility on the part of editors, which we know is all too frequently ignored.

I hope Leveson makes clear the distinction between what is in the public interest and what is of interest to the public. They are not the same thing.