For much of the last four years, he's been the quiet man of politics, rarely sticking his head above the parapet into the rhetorical crossfire of the council chamber.
But now Hounslow Conservative Group leader Peter Thompson is ready to come out fighting, and in his sights are some of the borough's Labour strongholds.
Heston, Cranford and Isleworth are among the traditionally staunchly red neighbourhoods he hopes to turn blue - and he says the groundwork for the invasion has already been laid.
"Having been in power for four years, there was a desire to focus less on the Civic Centre and spend more time out and about canvassing, particularly in Brentford & Isleworth, which is a marginal constituency," he said.
"We've done what we have to do as an opposition group in holding the Labour administration to account within the council chamber but we also felt it was important to get out and see what the people have to say on the streets.
"It's good to get out to more wards, where on paper you might say we don't have a great chance - places like, Isleworth, Heston and Cranford. We've never worked much before in those wards but I think people might be surprised come May 22 (the date of the local election)."
Mr Thompson has chosen his battles carefully since his party's chastening defeat in the 2010 local elections, leaving his more outspoken deputy Liz Mammatt to take on the role of political attack dog.
The party, led locally by former Conservative Colin Botterill, has put up 17 candidates across Hounslow for the upcoming elections, but Mr Thompson insists he is not scared of them diluting the Tory vote, as some analysts have predicted.
"I think in London they don't have the organisation they do in other parts of the country. I think the message appeals less in a more cosmopolitan, racially mixed part of the world than it perhaps does in the Home Counties," he said.
"I've got no idea what they stand for when it comes to the local election; at least with the Conservatives you know what we're about."
Mr Thompson did say the party had focused a lot of energy canvassing in Hanworth in a bid to win back the seats it lost to the defectors.
But asked whether he would consider forming a coalition with UKIP should they end up holding the balance of power on the council, he did not rule it out.
"We did good things in coalition (with the Independent Community Group) in the last administration, and we were able to put party politics to one side," he said.
"I still don't understand why some of the councillors defected to UKIP in the first place but I've always found it really helpful in politics not to get too personal.
"As long as we could agree on particular policy directions I'm not too bothered about who said what or who called who what, and I wouldn't rule anything out."
Mr Thompson is surprisingly slow to criticise the actions of the current Labour administration, despite budget cuts of £60 million presenting some easy targets.
"I think this administration has continued a lot of the work we started in terms of reducing the number of people at the Civic Centre and making the organisation a bit smarter and more business focused. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," he says.
However, there are a few things he says he would do differently - beginning with parking enforcement, one of the biggest bugbears for many voters.
The Conservative-led administration introduced CCTV cameras to large swathes of the borough, but Mr Thompson said he was disappointed to see many of them being used to catch motorists, rather than prevent crime - the purpose for which he says they were intended.
One of the Conservative Group's seven priorities in its manifesto is to introduce a 'fair parking policy', which would include extending the 'grace period' before drivers are fined for stopping illegally.
"There are lots of places where if people pop into the newsagents or dry cleaners they shouldn't get a £60 fine because they're not holding up traffic. There's a grace period of one minute but we would like to see that extended to five or 10 minutes," he said.
"We would also like to move away from using cameras altogether for parking enforcement and leave it to traffic wardens at the most congested locations."
The group's other key manifesto pledges include asking the Boundary Commission to cut the number of councillors by a third; building a new secondary school in the borough; and introducing a Hounslow Card, which would give residents parking discounts plus money off at leisure centres and other facilities.
Street cleaning is another priority. In approving its latest budget in February Labour accepted a Conservative motion to pump an extra £1 million from the council's reserves into tidying up the borough's thoroughfares - a decision Mr Thompson admits surprised even him.
But the Tory group leader said he was concerned some of that money was being spent on cameras to catch fly-tippers rather than 'getting more people out there with brushes and sweepers'.
One area of common ground for the two parties is council tax. Unlike in 2010, neither has made any promises when it comes to freezing or cutting the tax, with both apparently realising the coming cuts could bite even harder than those of the last four years.
"We took £50 million out of the budget when we were in power and they've done the same, and I'm sure most people won't have noticed much difference in performance," said Mr Thompson.
"The real challenge is going to come in the next four years. There's only so much you can do in terms of improving efficiency. Eventually you have to make difficult calls about front line services and where your priorities lie."
All the evidence suggests it's a challenge the Conservatives won't have to face. After all, they're contesting a traditionally Labour borough at a time when most polls have Labour significantly in front nationally, and some put the Tories third behind UKIP.
But despite the inevitable pressures of his job as head of year 13 at an inner-London school, after four years spent dodging the political spotlight Mr Thompson has the look of a man refreshed for the battle ahead.
