Contemporary biography presents many challenges, even more so when the subject is a politician who is still in office. It is, at best, a progress report: necessarily provisional both in its analysis and its attempt to anticipate the weightier judgment of history. By its very nature, it inclines more towards journalism than towards scholarly assessment.

John Howard has been a constant presence in Australian living rooms for the past three decades, in the endless cavalcade of public life a familiar character whose fortunes we have seen fall and rise, uneven script and all. He was cast as the bit player: often irritating, sometimes inept, always earnest, but omnipresent despite a near-death experience or two. Then, suddenly, almost surreptitiously, he is centre stage: Rosencrantz as prince. A physically unremarkable figure, possessed of no discernibly distinguished intellect; articulate but unmemorable in speech; flaunter of a practised ordinariness: this man has accumulated political milage as Geoffrey Boycott scored runs – arduously, incrementally and unspectacularly. He is now, to the surprise of almost everyone, quite possibly even himself, the second longest-serving of all twenty-five Australian prime ministers, behind only Robert Menzies.