Andy Burnham’s first party conference as leader has vast hoardings emblazoned with a “Hope Again” motto. It has second-marriage undertones – the implication being that hope had unfortunately died after the wedding night with the last incumbent and now we’re bravely having another go.

Hope is also the merchandise on insistent sale in the Liverpool conference centre. Lucy Powell has just rebranded her education fiefdom “my Department for Hope”, which teetered into Orwellian mode. No doubt, though, as one of the MPs driving the Prime Minister’s No 10 North plans puts it, the mood is more upbeat than last year: “It turns out that charisma does matter after all.”

That is the Burnham we have been introduced to – confident, cheerful – returning here as Labour’s victor ludorum over a vanquished Sir Keir Starmer, just a year after mounting his challenge.

Behind the scenes, however, the new premier is a more reflective and even sombre character. This week, he made what may turn out to be the most significant move of his leadership: putting paid to a stubborn rumour that, with a polling uptick behind him, he might plump for an early election. “All of this speculation on an early election, I can knock that dead.”

Behind that reassurance lie clues to the concerns a new leader has about his own trajectory. This conference will be dominated by twin pillars of his project – his plan for social care as the big domestic achievement he wants to define his premiership, and his attack on rises in welfare spending, when his party has shown, in the blooding of Starmer and his former chancellor Rachel Reeves, that it finds welfare cuts squeamish........

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