Britain's Labour Party gathers for its annual conference on Sunday, buoyed by being back in power for the first time in 14 years but already under pressure on several fronts.
The four-day gathering in Liverpool, northwest England, comes two months after Labour secured a landslide general election victory over the Conservatives that made leader Keir Starmer prime minister.
The centre-left group last held its yearly get-together as Britain's governing party in 2009 when Gordon Brown was premier.
"The atmosphere will be obviously celebratory because it's just won a majority of 174 seats," said Patrick Diamond, a former Downing Street policy adviser.
"In that sense, it will be an upbeat conference," he told AFP.
Tony McNulty, a government minister when Labour last ran the UK and a veteran of more than 30 party conferences, agreed but added that any backslapping is likely to be restrained.
"I know from Starmer down they'll want as a government to do it in a very business-like way. They'll be trying not to over-celebrate and over-congratulate themselves," he told AFP.
Tempering the mood will be anxieties over the size of the task Labour faces as the party gets to work implementing what it has called "a decade of national renewal".
Starmer, 62, has spent much of his first weeks in office accusing the Tories of leaving everything from the economy and prisons to the National Health Service in a total mess.
The Conservatives in response accuse him of scaremongering over the inheritance and claim that he is laying the groundwork for tax rises.
"It feels a bit doom and gloom on another level, so it's a fairly mixed bag," said McNulty.
The conference comes at the end of a week dominated by negative headlines over Starmer receiving more than £100,000 in declared gifts and hospitality since December 2019 - the most of any MP.
The Tories accuse him of hypocrisy since the government is asking ordinary Britons to tighten their belts.
British newspapers are also full of reports of tensions at the top of government between Starmer's chief of staff Sue Gray and several political advisers.
It is all adding to a feeling that Starmer's short honeymoon after taking office on July 5 is well and truly over.
Week-long riots by far-right activists in early August sucked up energy while he endured flak, including from Labour left-wingers, for refusing to scrap a controversial child benefit cap.
He has also repeatedly defended scrapping a winter fuel benefit for 10 million pensioners as a necessary "tough choice" to help fill a £22-billion "black hole" in public finances that he says the Tories left behind.
"It's this weird situation where they haven't really done that much (and) some of the few things they have done have actually been very unpopular," said Steven Fielding, a politics professor at Nottingham University.
Starmer has faced growing calls recently to offer a more positive outlook that Britons can feel hopeful about, and experts expect a taste of this in his keynote address on Tuesday.
Budget
"While he is right to talk about tough choices, he does also need to kind of start to get people to visualise what the optimistic, uplifting vision is," said Diamond.
But Starmer and finance minister Rachel Reeves, who speaks on Monday, are unlikely to deviate too far from their central message that the Tories broke everything.
That is because Labour's first budget in a decade and a half looms on October 30. The prime minister has already warned Britons that it will be "painful", and tax rises and spending cuts are expected.
Fielding notes that Labour is betting on voters seeing an improvement in their lives by the next election, likely five years away.
But patience among the public and party activists may not last.
"We've got this awkward one, two, three-year period where things may not get measurably much better across a whole range of things.
"It's going to be a very interesting and difficult period for this government.