GORDON BROWN’S job application to become Prime Minister was tantalisingly elusive. It was long on broad themes and hints, and short on specifics, leaving open the main questions about what Brown’s Britain would be like in practice.

In a less hectoring, and more effective, speech than before, Mr Brown showed why he is still by a long way the front-runner to become leader. His selling point was that his “experience and values” give him “the strength to take the tough decisions”.

After praising Tony Blair at the start, he went on to signal a change of style in Downing Street. He decried the politics of celebrity and spectacle, as opposed to substance and service, an implied rebuke also to David Cameron. So we can expect a more austere approach: no Cool Britannia froth, a term that Mr Brown has always hated. Banishing the more unpopular aspects of Blairite spin and glitz will win friends and mark a new start.

As before, Mr Brown highlighted constitutional reform. There was an intriguing half-sentence saying: “We do not today have a written constitution.” True, but does that mean he wants one? If so, that would have huge implications. Judges would have much greater powers than now in deciding whether a ministerial act or law was constitutional.

Mr Brown also repeated, in more explicit terms than before, his view that, apart from emergency action, Parliament, not the executive, should make “the final decisions on matters as important as peace and war”. Mr Blair applauded this commitment, although only a few months ago the Government specifically rejected such an idea as impracticable. Mr Blair has been reluctant to formalise the precedent of the March 2003 vote just before the Iraq war. A detailed proposal for a parliamentary vote before British troops are deployed overseas was put forward only two months ago by the Constitution Committee of the Lords.

A Brown constitutional package would involve “a radical shift of power from the centre”. Giving the examples of the independence of the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Competition Commission, he talked of examining how elsewhere decisions that elected politicians must make could be separated from the business of day-to-day administration. This is an intriguing idea, but it is much harder to separate policy and operations in other areas, such as, say, the NHS.

Moreover, Mr Brown has form. It is all very well for him to talk of “looking at the power of patronage including over appointments”. But he strongly resisted a cross-party call in 1997 for MPs to vote on nominations to the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee. And his Treasury has been pretty centralist in its behaviour, both inside and outside Whitehall. In urging that local councils, not Whitehall should have more power, he did not mention greater financial autonomy. But devolution will mean little until councils are given more freedom to raise taxes.

Mr Brown also has a reputation, in Charles Clarke’s phrase, as a “control freak”, tribal and mistrustful of colleagues. Many people will be sceptical about his promise to shift power away from the centre, and “to draw on all the talents of our party and country”, until they see evidence that he has changed his personal style. Mr Brown has to reinvent himself first.

Today's agenda

9am Environment debate

10.45 Debates on foreign affairs and defence

2.15pm Tony Blair gives his final leader’s speech

3.30pm Policy seminars on health, education and local government