“The greatest difficulty for any opposition is if the media think they’re somewhat irrelevant, if you’ve lost an election,” Haddon said.
Fall faced this pressure while the Tories were in opposition in the mid-2000s, and encouraged Cameron to grab the focus of voters by heading out of Westminster. “You’ve got to get out and about round the country,” she said. “You can’t just be holed up doing a good job in parliament.”
The path to power
Every Tory MP wants their time in opposition to be kept to an absolute minimum. However, history suggests that in Britain this is rarely the case, with both Labour and the Tories having spent long spells out of office after losing power.
“It is often the case that a new opposition spends quite a lot of time examining why it lost and having debates amongst itself,” Haddon said, making it tricker to connect with voters. “It is hard often to pick yourselves up from that position.”
Fall, who worked for the Conservative Research Department when incumbent PM John Major lost to Tony Blair in 1997, agreed. “There’s always going to be a blame game after a lost election,” with disagreements over who or what was at fault.
A party can therefore be tempted to enter its comfort zone following a rout, as Tory MP Charles Walker warned. “Any party when they lose a general election tends to lose its self-confidence and that is absolutely fatal,” he said. “There’s this sort of political appetite for simple solutions to complex problems.”
