• The former cabinet secretary, Lord O’Donnell, and the next head of the FDA trade union, Dave Penman, have called for a better pay deal for senior civil servants.
O’Donnell – who has just taken on an advisory role with Canadian business TD Bank Group – said in his maiden speech in the House of Lords yesterday that “the Treasury’s turnover rate is far too high and its pay levels too low. It is in the interests of all of us that the Treasury is able to continue attracting the best and retaining their skills and experience.”
Meanwhile, Penman told last week’s Independent on Sunday that “at some point you get a situation where our members are saying ‘enough’s enough,’ and those who have got the choice will start to go.”
• Steve Hilton, the key Number 10 special adviser, will not return from his sabbatical at Stanford University in California, according the Independent on Sunday. “He absolutely won’t be coming back. Cameron is totally furious. He has completely had enough,” the newspaper quotes one source as saying.
• Chancellor George Osborne told the Leveson Inquiry on Monday that the idea to put Jeremy Hunt in charge of the BSkyB bid after a Telegraph sting caught out business secretary Vince Cable was not his but that of the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood – then permanent secretary of Number 10. “My recollection is that it was Jeremy Heywood’s idea