Chris

The period 1992-1997 really doesn't map onto this one. The only thing it really has in common is the slim Tory majority, but even that similarity is superficial. Labour should have won in 1992 but the vote, while it swung their way, did not swing far enough. That is not what happened in 2015. Here, the Tories did not narrowly avoid defeat, they romped home with a significantly improved majority.

That in turn will affect the whole tenor of the next 5 years. From 1992, John Major led a fractious parliamentary party that knew it was on borrowed time. There's no point toadying up to the leadership if you know you have no chance of a ministerial career. The only strategy in those circumstances is to play to the gallery, namely the core vote in your own constituency. That is exactly what Major's infamous "barstewards" did, with the effect that they made the Tory party look ever more unelectable as 1997 drew near. They were not complacent and did not assume they would win in 1997. On the contrary, they knew there was nothing they could do to avoid defeat. The only question on election night in 1997 was how badly the Tories were going to get slaughtered.

On the other side of the coin, of course, you had Tony Blair, who in the late 90s looked just as attractive to the electorate at large as Jeremy Corbyn looks ridiculous today. I covered a by-election early in 1997 as a young reporter in what had been a safe Tory seat and followed Blair around a bit one day when he was out on the stump. The shock-and-awe of the New Labour election winning machine was astounding, all the more so because at the time we only dimly understood exactly how extensive it was. They made it look like there really was no alternative to Blair's Labour. Small wonder they won a thumping great landslide later that year.

There is absolutely no way Labour is going to be able to get that sort of operation together for 2020 - not with Corbyn in the vanguard.