Cameron’s plan for a graceful exit all hinges on the referendum

The year 2019 seems a long way away. Whether or not David Cameron can stay in office until then is this week’s hot topic of conversation among Tories. They wonder how many more weeks like the last two the Prime Minister can endure. Before Parliament broke up for Easter, the view among Cameron loyalists was that the Tory party needed a holiday. The thinking went that the recess would remove MPs from the Westminster pressure cooker and let referendum tempers cool. But this break turned out to be a disaster. The government spent the first week trying to get on top of the Port Talbot steel story and the second attempting to fend off the fallout from the Panama papers.

For Cameron himself, the break was a reminder of how hard it is for any contemporary leader to have anything approaching a normal life. First, he had fellow guests snapping and tweeting his movements on his break in Lanzarote.