Ministers should face regular performance reviews in the same way employees do in every other profession, an influential think tank suggests today.

Britain's most senior civil servant has a reputation for ruffling prime ministerial feathers. But is he becoming too powerful?

Another teenage scribbler?

If civil servants act to thwart measures they dislike or deem contrary to their interests, this raises the very serious question of the Government's power to govern

To the surprise of many observers, the powerful Treasury Select Committee will be chaired by Andrew Tyrie, the Tory MP for Chichester and a former special adviser to Nigel Lawson and John Major.

Broadcaster Adam Boulton expressed regret today over a furious on-air spat with Labour's former head of communications, Alastair Campbell.

The stock market, once it has settled down after the euro affair, may be the investment answer

With few international parallels, the Office for Budget Responsibility is the latest event in a process that is taking economic policy away from politicians, Sean O'Grady reports

No political office is more demanding – and as this week's revelations of tensions between Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling illustrate, none is less forgiving. For his latest BBC series, Michael Cockerell asked chancellors past and present how they survived Whitehall's toughest brief

Nigel Lawson asserts that suspecting "wicked oil companies" of sowing disinformation "will not do". On the contrary, the report "Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air" in 2007, from the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US, lays out very clearly what companies such as ExxonMobil have been up to in pursuing a campaign to sow doubt about anthropogenic climate change, mirroring the Big Tobacco campaign in previous decades. He is right to say that there is "far too much at stake" to make simplistic assumptions. There is also, I suggest, too much at stake to procrastinate endlessly in the fond hope that the issue might go away, despite significant evidence to the contrary, or at least become someone else's problem.

The former chancellor takes aim at the <i>IoS</i> and says that the debate on global warming is not a question of 'goodies and baddies'.

It was Dr Johnson, who, when one of his young aristocratic friends was thinking of going into politics, urged him to go ahead, observing that he would "make a very pretty rascal".

The Conservative peer Lord Lawson, the Tory MP David Davis and other politicians who have been casting doubt on the science of global warming in advance of next week's Copenhagen climate conference were "climate saboteurs", Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said yesterday.

In a way, the revolt in the Conservative Party against the conventional science of global warming redounds to David Cameron's credit. That so many prominent people in his party disagree with the leader's policy underlines his courage in defying the instincts of so many of his followers.