It is sobering to read these two optimistic works about a man of promise, written in mid-2004, in the light of their subject’s defeat in October 2004. Neither author was convinced that Latham could win. Barry Donovan has too much experience of the vagaries of the electorate to be anything but cautious, though he concludes with the hope that ‘the Lodge may yet have a prime minister’s young kids bouncing around in it before Christmas’. Through Margaret Simons’s essay runs an undercurrent of doubt about such a possibility, and she identifies Latham’s Achilles heel: ‘For decades, voters have been told that the main job of politicians is to manage the economy ... [and] I doubt if Latham will be able to convince them that it is now acceptable to vote on the basis of social issues, and the concrete things that directly affect their lives.’

These are two very different approaches to Latham. Donovan’s Mark Latham is a quickie biography – ‘Mark Latham, old Oils fan, new Labor leader, circuit-breaker extraordinaire’ – which, at its best, is informed by Donovan’s own intimate experience of high politics, an experience which enables him to secure a series of high-profile interviews, above all with Latham himself. Simons’s Latham’s World, in the excellent Quarterly Essay series, ‘is not biography ... [but rather an essay on] what the Latham phenomenon means’. She did not get an interview with the Labor leader, and this rankles throughout. She had, instead, to attend one of his community meetings, and produces a memorable physical description of the Labor leader as ‘big, boofy even when well-groomed – like a version of Ginger Meggs grown up and gone into politics’. As this suggests, her work is more detached and critical than Donovan’s, but, surprisingly, it is also more authoritative on those biographical issues they both deal with.