Promoting Cameron from a party leader to a national leader

Danny Finkelstein’s paean of praise (£) to Andrew Cooper, the PM’s new director of political strategy, contains several interesting lines.  Finkelstein says that his former flat mate’s biggest challenge is, ‘Devising a strategy for changes in the NHS so that a critical political battle isn’t lost disastrously’. This is yet another indication of how nervous Osborne and co are about Lansley’s reforms and reopening the NHS as a political issue.

The second is him reporting that Cooper will tell ‘Cameron to be a national leader, rather than a party politician. Especially in the Commons.’ To date, Cameron has been — with some notable exceptions such as his statement on Bloody Sunday — an aggressive Commons performer. Nearly every session of PMQs has involved the PM hurling a serious of pre-prepared insults at Ed Miliband.

Cameron seems to accept the intellectual case for not using PMQs in this way; he has talked before about ending