Comments on Politico are post-moderated – that is, they are reviewed after posting. Posts which are in breach of the guidelines below will be removed. Readers can alert us to comments that are in breach of the guidelines by clicking the flag icon at the bottom of every comment.

- Personal attacks (on authors, other commenters, or any individual), persistent trolling and mindless abuse will not be tolerated.

- We will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate-speech, or contributions that could be interpreted as such. We recognise the difference between criticising a particular government, organisation, community or belief and attacking people on the basis of their race, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or age.

- We will remove any content that may put us in legal jeopardy, such as potentially libellous or defamatory postings.

- We will remove any posts that are obviously commercial or otherwise spam-like.

- Relevance - While conversations are often wide-ranging, if you post something which is unrelated to the original topic then it may be removed, in order to keep the comment thread on track.