Andy Burnham had plenty to say about where the government - and the country - was going wrong at last year's Labour conference in Liverpool. But that was at a fringe meeting on the sidelines of the main event. Now, as Labour leader and prime minister, he is the main event - and it is down to him to show party members and the wider public that he has some answers.
Earlier this week, he said his debut leader's speech would leave nobody in any doubt about "what I'm trying to do in this role". "People are going to know the direction I want to take this country and I will set it down quite clearly," he told reporters en route to the UN General Assembly in New York. An internal No 10 note has set out the broad themes he will explore when he takes to the stage in Liverpool on Tuesday - including setting out long-term solutions to build a belief that the future can be brighter.
The slogan for this year's conference is "Hope Again". So in his speech he is likely to point to his forthcoming 10 Year Plan for the UK – which, he says, will have "making life more affordable" at its core. As for the specifics of what he will say, some of it will be very familiar to anyone who was listening to his conference fringe speech 12 months ago.
Back then, he declared then that the country had "lost control" of "the essentials" following the Thatcher-era sell off of utilities and that we were all "overpaying for water, housing energy, transport". He called for a renewed emphasis on technical education and wanted to see a decade of council house building on the scale of the post-war Labour government. For a politician frequently denounced for "flip flopping" he has been remarkably consistent in recent times.
He is likely to re-alight on themes from his Labour leadership campaign – saying more about his commitment to greater "public control" – though not necessarily public ownership - of life's necessities; building national resilience in an unstable world; and investing political capital in the reform of social care. A potential crowd pleaser would be to tell Labour activists from the main stage what he told them as Greater Manchester mayor from the fringe last year – that he will set up a commission to examine electoral reform. Such a move would be supported by about a quarter of his own MPs and would tie in with his leadership campaign promise of "a new politics", focused on "problem solving" rather than "point scoring".
We are also likely to hear more about getting young people into work or training, with the conclusions of the review by the former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn likely to be published soon. And there is certain to be plenty about his efforts to devolve power away from Whitehall to England's mayors and the new No 10 North. The task for Burnham is to meld these snapshots into a compelling and coherent narrative, culminating in a vision of the Britain he wants to see a decade from now.
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