Economic View: By leaving office in June 2007, Tony Blair managed, in stock market terms, to sell at the top

New survey has the Prime Minister ahead of only John Major and Gordon Brown

The Queen became the first monarch to attend a cabinet meeting in peacetime since the 18th century but if you’ve had audiences with prime ministers for as long as she has, you can’t fail to have a view

Ed Miliband borrowed a political philosophy from the Tories as he sought to position Labour as an inclusive “one nation” party.

Baroness Ashton, head of the European Union diplomatic service, reportedly panicked ahead of a crucial meeting with Serbia's president Tomislav Nikolic because she did not know what he looked like and was fearful of shaking the wrong person's hand.

Sir Richard Needham's resignation from the board of Lonrho brings back bad memories of the group's controversial past

If the 1960s were the decade in which the British public fell in love with the consumer society, then the 1970s were the decade in which they discovered that this relationship had to be paid for. "Butskellism", the cross-party economic orthodoxy that dominated fiscal policy for the best part of a quarter of a century, now looks more like an exercise in wool-pulling, deluding yourself into thinking that you could sustain an economy on borrowing, not caring that your manufacturing sector was going down the pan and conciliating the demands of organised labour at any cost. As Dominic Sandbrook shows in the fourth segment of his entertaining history of post-war Britain, the later 1970s were the age in which most of these economic chickens came calamitously home to roost.

The UK Independence Party has more reason than any other to complain about the British election system: despite winning 900,000 votes at the last general election it has no MPs. In the European Parliament, which is elected by proportional representation, the party has a dozen MEPs.

Alex Salmond has always been renowned as a formidable political operator. Then suddenly, with pandas on the scene, Scotland's First Minister trips over his own feet with an ad describing them as a "gift" and an embarrassing rebuke from the advertising watchdog.

Westminster Abbey is to honour two former prime ministers from the 1970s with memorial stones.

Conservative Party co-chairman Baroness Warsi paid tribute today to Tory peer and former Cabinet minister Baron Carr of Hadley, who died aged 95 on Friday.

Sir Tom Cowie spent 45 years building up the business which became, to his disgust, "Arriva" buses, and after parting with it in 1993, set out to conquer the world again with a metal-importation warehousing enterprise set in his native Sunderland's old shipyards that now encompasses China and Singapore. Leadership fascinated him, and his judgment proved wrong only in an affair close to his heart, the fortunes of Sunderland football club, to which, while chairman from 1980-86 he disastrously appointed Lawrie McMenemy as manager. McMenemy left in 1987 and the Black Cats were relegated for the first time to the Third Division.

As Opposition Leader and Prime Minister, Harold Wilson was careful about the choice of his Parliamentary Private Secretary. He displayed shrewd judgement, and it was never shrewder than the choice of Charlie Morris in the crucial years from 1970-74. Morris was immensely well-liked across the spectrum of a fractious Parliamentary Labour Party. And he was a reflective colleague, with good judgement about issues and people. He had an unerring "feel" for the Labour movement.

Pandas are the WAGs of the animal kingdom: superficially attractive, but talentless