SOME time after his short, early-1960s stint in 10 Downing Street, Alec Douglas-Home got talking to an old lady at Berwick railway station. “My husband and I think it was a great tragedy that you were never prime minister,” she told him. To which came the embarrassed response: “As a matter of fact, I was.”

Like Douglas-Home, David Cameron is an old-Etonian, “noblesse-oblige” sort of one-nation Conservative. But no such obscurity awaits him. His is already a substantial premiership; if he hangs on for nine months, he will have outlasted any post-war prime minister except Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. But for what will he be known? Now is a good time to ask. If he loses the EU referendum on June 23rd, he will probably go. If he wins, he has pledged to stand down before the 2020 election and will come under pressure from his Eurosceptic MPs to do so sooner.

Already there are two schools of Cameronology. The first considers him the far-sighted strategist who restored the Tories’ old knack for winning majorities; who not only marched his tribe into the centre ground but had it pitch its wigwams there and force the Labour Party into the left-wing wilderness; who made Britain fairer and safer in tumultuous times. At its conference last October he told his party that it could be “incredibly proud of our journey: the journey of the modern, compassionate, one-nation Conservative Party.”

The second school of Cameronology views the prime minister as an out-of-touch toff prone to complacency. It treats the litany of negative clichés about his party—its “nasty” instincts on poverty, migrants and health care; its cultural dysphoria in modern Britain; its bug-eyed neuroticism about the EU—as a roll-call of ogres Mr Cameron has declined to confront. Tim Bale, a historian of the Conservative Party, reckons that he has mostly “disappointed those who thought he might drag his party towards the centre and into the 21st century”.

Posterity will draw on both schools in judging Mr Cameron’s premiership. But in what proportions? The Queen’s Speech on May 18th should be understood in the context of that debate. As the monarch announced the bills to go before Parliament in what may be the last session of the Cameron era, it was easy to imagine the prime minister pondering his place in the history books. It is clear, for example, that he wants to go down as a leader who made Britain secure in the age of Islamic State. There will be a crackdown on extremist websites, hardliners will be kept from working with children, and the state will strong-arm councils failing to tackle radicalisation.

The heart of the Queen’s Speech was its raft of compassionate social reforms: it proposed, for instance, to improve prisoner rehabilitation, build 1m new homes (believe that when you see it) and help the low-paid establish a rainy-day fund. All this revived the sunny centrism which defined Mr Cameron’s early leadership from 2005, much of which had been shelved as the financial crisis set in and harshened the mood. It even came with a slogan: “Improving life chances”.

The slogan should have been “Love-bombing Harlow”. Thanks partly to Robert Halfon, its energetic Conservative MP, that Essex town has become a byword for upwardly mobile but financially insecure voters—often the first generation in their families to hold white-collar jobs—who dislike government meddling but think the state should make it easier for people like them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Philosophically individualistic, yet too close to hardship to be libertarians, these folk suspect Labour of being too soft and the Tories of being out-of-touch. Electorally decisive, they are the landlords of the political centre; politicians are merely their tenants. Mr Cameron wants to bequeath his party a long lease.

All of which is admirable—bearing favourable comparison with a Labour Party which has lost interest in that kind of real estate—but perhaps unrealistic. For today the air is thick with insults and lurid claims flying between Tories on opposite sides of the EU debate. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, has called his pro-Brexit colleagues “economically illiterate”. On the day of the Queen’s Speech Iain Duncan Smith, a Eurosceptic who in March resigned as welfare secretary, toured the television studios calling Mr Cameron’s one-nation overtures a sham.

The thirty years war

Downing Street is doing what it can to make June 24th the “sanity day” when normal service resumes and the government gets back to chiselling out Mr Cameron’s legacy. There is talk of big jobs for Brexiteers in a “reconciliation reshuffle”; Michael Gove is spoken of as deputy prime minister and Boris Johnson as home secretary (for whom room would be made by moving Theresa May to the Treasury and Mr Osborne to the Foreign Office).

But the Brexiteers have other plans. One rumour has it that, in the event of a Remain win, 100 MPs could endorse a vote of no confidence in Mr Cameron, double the number needed to trigger a leadership election. Meanwhile his government still has a small majority and has lately performed successive U-turns as its bolder wheezes (most recently forcing state schools to become semi-autonomous academies) have fallen foul of the arithmetic. So its ability to whip through centrist, Harlow-friendly legislation in the coming months is doubtful; certain Tory MPs even talk of stymying such measures in revenge for a Remain win, or to force a second referendum.

That is pathetic. Yet the blithe premise of Mr Cameron’s decision to call a referendum—that the vote would “clear the air” in the Conservative Party—was always bunkum. It is baffling that, as one who lived through the Tory Euro-battles of the 1990s, he did not foresee the psychodrama now unfolding. The prime minister deserves a better place in the history books than the one that may now await him. But it would serve him right.

Economist.com/blogs/bagehot