Honesty is an attractive though rare quality in a politician, and Alistair Darling’s self-awareness and morose delivery always grabs attention. Last night, the former chancellor told a conference of bankers that the 50 percent levy on bonuses over £25,000 was a failure. The FT reports him saying: ‘I think it will be a one-off thing because, frankly, the very people you are after h...

The former chancellor admitted that Britain's levy on bonuses had failed to change banking behaviour over pay, as 'imaginative' financiers devised ways to avoid it

There's a remarkable self-certainty about what we've seen of Tony Blair's book so far. Sure, there are the fleeting moments of doubt and insecurity: the drinking that was becoming less a pleasure and more a habit, for instance.  But, apart from that, the dominant motif is how His Way was the Right Way. And so, he was right to keep Brown on as Chancellor. He was, it seems, right...

Leading statistical body questions Chancellor's claim that a £5.8bn tax grab from benefits, tax credits and public service pensions is 'fair'.

Opus unlikely to repair relations with Brown, whom he portrays as an opponent of public service reform who enjoyed an inflated public reputation during his decade as chancellor while he 'sheltered beneath my umbrella'

Gordon Brown was a "maddening" figure but Tony Blair decided that he could not get rid of his chancellor as he was better inside and constrained than sacked from the Government.

And Westminster's Idle Question of the Day is: will Ed Balls be made shadow chancellor under a Miliband leadership? There are good arguments both for and against the proposition – and most of them are made in this blog post by the Guardian's Nicholas Watt. Even Blairites, he says, are warming to the idea of Balls running Labour's economic policy. But if it's to happen und...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke out in favour of extending the use of nuclear power plants in Germany in a television interview on 29 August, saying it would be reasonable if they could run another 10 to 15 years.

by Ed Balls INTRODUCTION I am very grateful to Bloomberg for giving me the opportunity to come here this morning to respond to the bullish speech given from this same platform by George Osborne 10 days ago. That speech is the clearest articulation of the Cameron-Clegg Coalition strategy for this parliament. In it, their Chancellor repeated his claim that

Under anodyne questioning on WATO from stand-in Brian Hanrahan, Balls has just disqualified himself as a credible shadow chancellor. He ducked questions about when deficit reduction should start and how long the phasing of it should be, by saying that even discussion of that should wait for two years to see how the economy performed. So he'd be content to see state debt continue to shoot up. ...