RICHARD Leonard’s first major speech after becoming Scottish Labour’s ninth leader since devolution began with a declaration of intent.

“I was elected Scottish Labour leader promising real change and it is real change that together we will deliver,” he told Jeremy Corbyn and a room packed with party activists in Glasgow.

In case anyone missed it, Mr Leonard repeated the phrase “real change” another 13 times.

As he did during his leadership bid, he is promising a difference people can believe in.

Some candidates tend to backslide after winning, but Mr Leonard’s clear message was that he is not one of those.

He wants to leave behind the messy, compromised, uninspiring Scottish Labour of recent years and unite it around it around its most radical Holyrood platform yet in order to win to power.

He announced a dozen policy reviews to shake up the party’s offering on health, education, the workplace and local government.

There is also a commission on new wealth, land and property taxes, and plans for a massive extension of public ownership, with buses, ScotRail and energy the prime candidates for change.

And he wants all these things to be advanced quickly, with an eye to affirmation at his party’s next conference in March.

It was an ambitious and energetic performance.

At one point he was so carried away he said he wanted Scottish Water in public ownership - it is already publicly owned.

But while Mr Leonard was undoubtedly pleased with his own radicalism, it is far from clear whether it will inspire voters.

Many of his ideas were of the kind civil servants label “brave”.

Not just because they are technically and financially challenging, but because they also risk angering the electorate as much as impressing them.

Mr Leonard’s appears to think that if he can re-energise Labour’s traditional working class base and retrieve former supporters tired of a “mediocre and timid” SNP, he can afford to alienate the better-off and aspirational with higher taxes.

But that seems to ignore the fact that the SNP, for all its twists and triangulations in power, is still far more popular than Labour.

Pragmatism has served it well.

Mr Leonard’s hot pursuit of a radical agenda may be admirably consistent with his campaign rhetoric, but that does not mean the nation is itching to embrace it.

The SNP and Tories are sure to denounce it as insanely painful and ruinously expensive, while voters have a right to expect more than cut-and-paste Corbynism.

Mr Leonard faces quite a task convincing people of such a cause.

If the UK government survives a few more years, Mr Leonard will also become the key electoral guinea pig for Corbynism.

If he prospers in the 2021 Holyrood election, it would be a springboard for UK Labour going into the 2022 general election. If he fails, a potentially lethal blow.

A slower, more considered, more nuanced approach by Mr Leonard may serve him and Mr Corbyn better in the end.