This book wasn’t Tanya Plibersek’s idea, or even her idea of a good idea, but confronted with its inevitability, she co-operated with a cool generosity. That way she kept an element of agency. That way, Margaret Simons tells us, she could have approval over quotes and family detail. It’s a decision of a piece with the sense of Plibersek that the book delivers: a woman of encompassing decency, a politician of calmly deliberative reason.

The access thus granted to friends and family also made possible the book’s most significant revelation: that Plibersek’s stepping back from the contest for Labor leadership after the party’s defeat in 2019, was in part due to the discovery that her daughter Anna, then 18, had suffered through serious and multifaceted mistreatment in a long-term abusive relationship.

That sudden walking away has long mystified many and disappointed Plibersek’s legion of fevered supporters, for whom she is the best leader the ALP is yet to have. Anna’s situation was part of the story, but not the whole story. Supporting her daughter was a crucial part of a momentous decision, says Plibersek, but being a present parent for her son Louis, then nine, was also significant.

“I’ve had a front row seat for a long time,” she tells Simons. “I know what it entails to do the job properly ... I love my job but I had to make the decision on what was right for us, what kind of parent I wanted to be.”

Plibersek is clear that she would have been the winner over Anthony Albanese in that vote: “We’ll never know. It’s history. But I am pretty confident that if I had run, I would have won.”

The true triumph of the Plibersek story laid out here is that what might have been in no way diminishes the impressive fact of what was, is, and could be. She emerges as a woman with an unstinting dedication to family and the people around her, and a politician of great skill and serious policy focus. There’s also a counter here to the saw that bemoans the lack of “real-life” experience in the career politician. It’s also a life enriched by the perpetual re-reading of Jane Austen; Elinor Dashwood, she of sense rather than sensibility, is a particular inspiration.

The Plibersek Simons describes, in rich and broadly sourced detail, may have spent a working life in politics, but it’s a life that reads as a determined and empathetic progress driven by family and progressive conviction, one free of the cynical calculation normally associated with the political professional.

This is an impressive piece of biography. Simons does not go in search of Plibersek, rather she comes to the page in confident possession of a substantial reservoir of fact from which she winnows an essence of her subject. It positively transformed my previously hesitating opinion.