The Slog was first with the ‘Osborne breaks ranks’ story last weekend. The Shadow Chancellor is clearly warming to his task…but rumours of a rift at the top of the Tory Party persist.

“We need more fire in the Conservative belly, to absolutely up the energy levels,” he said yesterday, “This is the election of our generation. The Conservative leadership, the Conservative Party, the whole Conservative family, needs to take the fight to Labour, to understand that we have got weeks to go in an election which will determine the future and fate of this country over the next generation.”

As we’ve been saying for weeks now, this is what the Party grassroots have been desperate to hear for some time. But following our informed tip last Saturday, Tory moles have turned tight-lipped on the other half of this story: what David Cameron thinks about future strategy.

At Prime Ministers’ questions this lunchtime, the Conservative Leader rightly focused on the Unite issue – something which, at last, has the Government on the back foot – but then strayed too quickly into personal attacks on a man who (it is already almost universally accepted) is at best odd, and quite possibly disturbed. Focus is good – wasting all his questions on Brown’s weak response to the BA strike isn’t. Where Labour is truly weak on this issue is the influence of Unite in the Party, not on BA workers.

There is an air of drift about Cameron at the moment. Friends and contacts keep insisting he will bounce back. They’re probably right – but I wish he’d get a move on. In the meantime, I wonder if his nose is out of joint since Osborne emerged from his shell last Sunday. A few gossips latched on to the fact that Ozzie wasn’t at Treasury Questions yesterday: was Dave giving him a dressing-down? I doubt it. But now the weapons are out of storage, I’m not sure it’s good form for the C-in-C to retreat to HQ and play with his maps. One Steve Hilton is more than enough.