The task of Opposition leaders is at best an uncomfortable one. They have to carefully scrutinize the work of the incumbent government, propose credible alternative policies and prove that they have the legitimacy of Prime Ministers in waiting. This role is all the more difficult when the image of their party has been tarnished by years of ideological uncertainty and fratricidal in-fighting. In recent political history, three leaders have had to face such challenging situations – Tony Blair and Keir Starmer for the Labour Party and David Cameron for the Conservatives – and it seems that every single time, they all resorted to similar kinds of narratives, focusing on the notion of “family”, to display the positive values they wanted to embody and to establish their ethos as responsible and caring political leaders. Through a corpus-based critical narrative analysis, this paper proposes to examine how what we might call “family narratives” helped Opposition leaders frame their claims to power, in a bid to decontaminate their political brand, modernize their party and reinforce their personal ethos.