UK:Labour's new leader has put the Conservatives on notice, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
An opinion poll bounce will carry Gordon Brown into 10 Downing Street on Wednesday with opportunity to radically recast his cabinet, and present him with a "honeymoon" period in which he can put Labour on a general election footing.
Tony Blair's successor will not cut and run in response to Tory taunts that, because elected unopposed to the Labour leadership, he lacks a mandate for government. For all the talk of the Blair "presidency" the UK is still a parliamentary democracy, and Brown rightly reminds Conservative leader David Cameron that the situation was no different when John Major was elected to succeed Margaret Thatcher.
That said, Brown will go into office fully focused on keeping it. And he reminded us yesterday that calculations about the next election will inform his every move - announcing that Douglas Alexander will be his general election co-ordinator, tasked to ensure Labour is ready to fight and win "whenever the prime minister decides to call it". Buoyed by Labour's first poll lead since last October - three points, according to Mori - Brown's first act as leader was to put the Conservatives on notice.
This longest-serving chancellor has endured 13 angst-filled years awaiting his opportunity, forever regretting his decision to make way for the younger man when convinced it should have been him who succeeded the late John Smith back in 1994.
From the recent account of a close friend of the Blairs, we know that Brown started pressing Blair to make way for him almost immediately after he won Labour an unprecedented second term in 2001. Blair's wife, Cherie - who conspicuously absented herself from yesterday's "coronation" in Manchester - reportedly wanted Brown sacked from the treasury. Newspaper revelations yesterday appeared to confirm earlier suggestions that Blair actually made preparations to do so ahead of the 2005 election.
Yet if it was ever possible, it was certainly too late by that point. Brown had to be recalled to a central campaigning role to help Blair win his third term, and while last September's attempted coup failed, it resulted in the timetable for his involuntary departure.
The departing prime minister put a brave face on it yesterday, taking the plaudits of Labour's special conference before introducing the man so long publicly impatient to take his job. Brown, he said, was a "strong" man, "sound in his convictions" and "true to his principles", with the makings of "a great prime minister". However, there can only have been personal pain and regret as Blair - now seated alongside John Prescott in the audience - listened to his long-time friend and rival vow to form "a new government" with priorities to meet "new challenges ahead" and to "heed and lead the call for change" across Britain.
King Tony is dead - or at any rate he will be after one last appearance for prime minister's questions on Wednesday followed by a final official audience with Queen Elizabeth. After that Brown will receive his seals of office and start assembling what he suggests will be a government truly serving the people, winning their "trust" by giving them and parliament greater powers, catering for those "who yearn for a politics based on values" by reaching beyond party lines, and showing itself to be "inclusive". And all of this presided over, of course, by a newly "collegiate" leader who claims to have learnt much during 10 years that convinced many colleagues only that he was a psychologically flawed control freak.
Some uber-Blairites cannot believe it, and the Tories will be praying it isn't so. Yet in his interview on the BBC's Politics Show yesterday there was something in Brown's demeanour supporting suggestions that he is suddenly a more relaxed figure, as if liberated knowing that the long wait is over.
Despite all the poison that rendered their relationship at times dysfunctional, Blair was also right to observe that they had in the end confounded the Tories by managing an orderly transition. Brown's honeymoon cannot be of the duration Blair enjoyed. But having ended Cameron's already, the prize is now his, and the next election - whenever he calls it - is indisputably still for Brown and "New Labour" to lose.