For most of the time I was a British MP, my party was out of government - these were the Thatcher years, when it was hard for anyone else to get a look-in. As a front-bencher and shadow minister, I became familiar with the strategies required in a parliamentary democracy of being in opposition to a well-supported government.
My colleagues and I settled quickly into the daily pattern of probing the day's political developments for opportunities to embarrass the Government, or at the very least to put it on the back foot. This meant a constant - and virtually daily - series of press conferences, comments and responses, and media releases designed to keep the pressure on, with the twin objective of showing the Government in a bad light and demonstrating the opposition were on the ball and had policies superior to those of the Government.
The media rapidly came to expect and rely on this daily diet of political guerrilla warfare, and commentators sympathetic to our cause did their best to amplify and flesh out the points we tried to make. Sometimes, our friends in the media did the job for us by launching their own hit and run attacks on the Government.
But, after a while, we began to realise we were getting nowhere with such tactics - and the public seemed quickly to grow tired of our predictably critical responses to anything proposed by the Government.
The voters were inclined to let our efforts pass them by, dismissing them as just par for the course - "well, they would say that, wouldn't they?" seemed to be the common response to our attacks. The harder we tried to land a blow on the Government, the more they seemed to say that it was just more of the same.