As if he were not under enough pressure already, George Osborne is now being widely tipped in Tory circles as the next party leader, with William Hague effectively out of the running and no other obvious contenders in sight. Making the step up from Chancellor to Prime Minister is not easy – if the economy is in good shape, there is probably no reason for the PM to leave office and, if it is in a mess, the Chancellor must share the blame. But some have made the transition. There have also been some notable failures.

Ed Miliband may think of the Chancellor as "Norman Lamont with an iPod", but Mr Osborne's announcement yesterday of new enterprise zones had more in common with the interventionist Lord Heseltine than the fiscally conservative former Tory chancellor.

Twenty years ago tomorrow, Margaret Thatcher quit as Prime Minister. Iain Dale recalls the Iron Lady's highly charged tearful last cabinet meeting

To Private Eye he was "GLE" – Greatest Living Englishman – and after their row he was sneered at as "Humpty-Dumpster". To a subordinate on his column he was "Caligula". One of his wives named a python after him – and that was before the divorce.

The PM should be wary – the new Labour leader could steal his Lib Dem pals and expose the harshness of his cuts

A polite, rather sterile word for the way that HM Revenue and Customs interacts with the general public would be "asymmetric". Thus, if your tax return is late or you happen to have misinterpreted one of their internally contradictory rules, these supposedly cuddly "tax doesn't have to be taxing" folk will threaten you, fine you and generally mistreat you in a manner that would have their counterparts in Pyongyang cooing in admiration at such unbending zeal. If HMRC bugger up your tax affairs, there is no compensation for you. Simple as.

Revenue: More people will be dragged into the 40 per cent tax band because Mr Osborne is freezing the threshold at which the top rate of tax kicks in

Everybody remembers the day they moved into a new house, and how they had to make do on the first night, because the bed linen had not been unpacked and the previous occupants had taken all the curtains. But it was probably not quite like that for David and Samantha Cameron and their two young children yesterday.

David Cameron and his family will move into 10 Downing Street today, more than two weeks after he became Prime Minister, he has revealed.

David Cameron has long been spoken of as a future prime minister. His biographer, James Hanning, charts his relentless rise

New Labour has amply demonstrated its unfitness for office over a dozen years

Gordon Brown hopes that the Chancellor's speech will keep him in Number 10. Andy McSmith looks at previous pre-election Budgets to see whether history is on the Prime Minister's side

Treasury's presentation of figures is misleading, says House of Lords committee

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