Being In Opposition Is Like "Guerrilla Warfare", Says Former David Cameron Aide
Baroness Fall worked for David Cameron when he was leader of the opposition and later prime minister (Alamy)
5 min read
A former senior aide to David Cameron has warned that being in opposition is like “guerrilla warfare”, and that the next leader of the Conservatives will have to deal with receiving much less attention than they got when in power.
Baroness Fall, now a Conservative peer, worked for former Tory leader Michael Howard in the 2000s before becoming Cameron’s private secretary when he became Conservative Party leader in 2005. After the Tories won power in 2010, Fall was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff in Downing Street and was nicknamed ‘The Gatekeeper’ of No10.
In 2024, as the Conservative Party follows through the process of selecting its new leader, the contenders and the wider party machine will have one eye on what they must do next to recover from the party’s worst general election defeat in its history on 4 July.
According to Fall, this will mean learning to be “agile” and adapting to having “influence rather than power”.
“When you come out of government, a lot of people who are fighting for these jobs are used to having lots of people, lots of support,” she told PoliticsHome.
“[In opposition], you basically have a small, agile team. It's guerrilla warfare, rather than having some huge department behind you.”
The biggest challenge, Fall said, would be for the new leader to figure out how they would handle the “blame game” of what went wrong for the party.
“Where are we heading? What does the centre-right now look like? Why are people voting for you?,” said Fall.
She said that a “skilful politician would not have to make the choice” between more right-wing voters and those in the centre, and instead should think about how the Tory party can appeal to as broad a voter base as possible – something which she felt Cameron was able to do well.
“If you look at Robert Jenrick, it’s very much ‘we didn't go hard enough on migration’ and you have a feeling that he's definitely eyeing up those votes that went to Reform,” she said.
“Someone like James Cleverly looks to me to be more wondering where all those masses of votes went in the centre.”
She added that she felt Cleverly, who finished third when Tory MPs held their first round of voting this week, was the most promising candidate to encourage the Tories to address “key issues” for the electorate and ensure voters are not driven towards populist parties.
Now the Conservatives are not in government the next leader faces a battle for national attention. This Parliament is more fragmented than ever, with the Tories, Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, the Green Party, and a caucus of independent pro-Gaza MPs all vying for attention and claiming to be the best voice to hold the Labour government to account.
Fall therefore argued that the Tories will have to think about how to make themselves “the most relevant opposition” and ensure their numbers do not get reduced even further at the next election. This, in her view, would mean they would have to get smart about how and when they communicate their messages.
“We would often do things at the weekend or the Monday morning before Whitehall really had time to gear into action,” she said, explaining how Cameron’s team would try to get around this problem in opposition.
“With David we did spend quite a lot of time thinking about how to do things differently.”
As opposition leader, Cameron, who had to overcome his reputation as being a member of the Eton and Oxford-educated political elite, experimented with different ways to reach “ordinary” people.
These included ‘WebCameron’, a series of online videos providing "behind-the-scenes access" to the Tory leader, and ‘Cameron Direct’, his tour across the country meeting voters which was intended as a throwback to ‘old-fashioned’ town hall meetings. These initiatives were designed to portray Cameron as someone who could appeal to a broader electorate and win power back from Labour.
“It sounds very archaic now, but we thought that was absolutely dynamic and modern,” Fall said.
But before the next leader tried to get too inventive with their campaigning, Fall said their first task will be to “steady the ship”. Fall worked for former leader Howard before Cameron, telling PoliticsHome she felt that Howard had handled this part of the process well before Cameron turned attentions to national campaigning.
“There is a party strategy – how are you going to handle the party? How are you going to mark that party out?," she said.
“Hopefully a smaller parliamentary party, although painful and difficult, also gives an opportunity to be a more intimate and unified party – less caucusing, less of a split.”
In the Cameron era, Fall was part of the leader's intimate circle of allies which included, among others, George Osborne, Oliver Letwin, and Michael Gove – who Fall later accused of having abandoned “loyalty and decency and become an arch-assassin” in her 2020 memoir, The Gatekeeper: Life At The Heart of No10, after Gove was seen to have betrayed Cameron by becoming a prominent figure in the ‘Leave’ campaign.
Many of Cameron’s closest political allies were people he had known since school and university, with Fall describing them as originally having been friends "in their 20s" who shared a “political philosophy” of what a new conservatism would look like.
“There's a sort of circle of trust which is important in politics,” Fall said.
“You don't want it to be so tight that you don't listen to anyone else. But you do want a sense of trust… It gives you momentum as well at the beginning. And it also means that you don't have what we've seen so much of during these late No10 years of endless leaks in the paper, endless briefing against each other.”
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