Ever since David Cameron won a thumping victory last month, it has been fashionable among Conservatives to talk of his having more authority than any leader since Tony Blair in 1997, The Tory prime minister was always liked by the punters; now, having delivered the first Tory majority since 1992, he is respected by his party, too. Yet the limits to Mr Cameron's power were plain, on June 8th, in the first of many threatened collisions with his party over its abiding irritant: Europe. The previous day, at the G7 Summit in Bavaria, Mr Cameron had intimated that his ministers would not be free to campaign to leave the European Union ahead of the referendum he has promised to hold on Britain's membership. This annoyed one or two of them considerably. Mr Cameron had given the opposite message, though similarly obliquely, in an exchange with Iain Duncan Smith, the Eurosceptic welfare secretary, shortly before. Moreover, why should the prime minister not allow his ministers to follow their conscience, on this most neuralgic of Tory concerns?
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