Premier league

At a large Tory breakfast meeting that David Cameron spoke to recently, the tables were named after all of the Conservative premiers of the past: the good, the bad and Ted Heath. So there were the Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher tables, for example. (I was delighted to be on the Winston Churchill table; the people on the Neville Chamberlain one looked suitably ill-favoured.) As Cameron — who was sat at the David Cameron table, appropriately enough — looked around the huge room that morning, he could be forgiven for wondering where he will wind up in the pantheon of past premiers.

For as Cameron nears his tenth anniversary as leader of the Conservative party in December, we can start to see the outlines of where he might stand historically, in relation to his predecessors. In terms of sheer longevity as prime minister, of course, he will beat most of the previous Tory occupants of No. 10: he has already outlasted Andrew Bonar Law, Alec Douglas-Home, Anthony Eden, Neville Chamberlain, Arthur Balfour, Edward Heath and Lord Derby.

Assuming that he resigns before the next election, in accordance with the pledge he gave before the last one, and times this so that his successor has a couple of years to establish himself or herself, Cameron will also overtake Harold Macmillan, Benjamin Disraeli, John Major and Stanley Baldwin. If he delayed his resignation for a few months, he could also overhaul Winston Churchill’s eight years and 240 days in office. (Like Churchill, Cameron was in coalition for his first term but enjoyed a Tory majority in his second.)

It would only be by reneging on his pledge not to stand again that Cameron would be in a position to equal Margaret Thatcher’s 11 or Lord Salisbury’s 13 years in power, and there is no indication that he will succumb to the disastrous misconception among prime ministers that they are indispensable.