As the twig is bent so grows the tree, a poet said.

What is experienced in youth — the “formative” years — inevitably shapes the adult, with some studies even suggesting personality is pretty much set for life by age 6 or 7.

Which brings us to Caroline Mulroney, contender to lead Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party after the abrupt departure from that post of Patrick Brown.

Seldom has Ontario been presented with a would-be premier who is quite so famous but about whom so little is really known.

In the weeks until the leadership, the battle will be on between supporters and opponents to define her and for Ontarians to appraise and understand her.

In that exercise, as her leadership campaign begins, and because many children of celebrity find their growing-up unusually well-chronicled, perhaps no field is quite so worth investigating as Mulroney’s gilded childhood.

If the formative process of leadership is passage through a personal crucible, it’s unknown yet what Caroline Mulroney’s might have been, or whether she’s had one.

She has never known a moment’s material want in her 43 years. One biography of the former PM quotes a family friend as saying mother Mila Mulroney provided the equilibrium for her husband and family, but spent incredibly.

“I’ve been there and seen her . . . spend $800 on a designer outfit for one of the kids. It’s incredible.”

What is known is that Caroline is a first-born, the older sister, in fact, to three brothers. In a family of more modest means, she likely would have become the deputy mother, tending to the siblings.

Though she likely did some of that — first-borns being sticklers for order, rules and high standards — there was staff at 24 Sussex Dr. to ensure it wasn’t too onerous.

As a child, Mulroney had that greatest of gifts, growing up — from age 10 to 19 with the PM’s residence for a home — amid love, watching a father and mother who genuinely seemed to dote on each other and on their children.

“I’ve rarely seen two people who were so frankly smitten with each other,” the late Michel Gratton, a media operative for Brian Mulroney, wrote in his book So, What Are the Boys Saying?

“He showed the same warmth to his children. I never heard him raise his voice to any of the four youngsters.”

The PM, smitten too with his only daughter, often asked Gratton how his own three daughters were doing.

“You’re lucky, Michel. Girls are a lot of fun.”

To be sure, Caroline was adored by her father, who in his memoirs called her “as delightful and wonderful a child as anyone could imagine.”

One biographer’s account quoted Mila portraying Caroline, even as a toddler, as Daddy’s girl — and a bit of a precocious media keener.

“She sits in Brian’s chair when he’s gone and says ‘Da-da’ over and over again. When Brian comes home she runs around excitedly pointing to all the pictures of him in the paper.”

It was a childhood unlike most. Caroline spent her 14th birthday canvassing for Lucien Bouchard in a Quebec byelection, a day that would live in infamy in the Mulroney family.

Bouchard sent Caroline a long, handwritten thank-you note afterwards for her efforts in getting him elected to the PC government. But soon enough he would bolt the Tories for the Bloc Québécois. Father Brian witnessed the trauma Caroline suffered as a result.

“Caroline walked into my den at 24 Sussex and quietly placed on my desk a letter she had received less than two years earlier from Lucien Bouchard,” he told biographer Peter C. Newman. “As Caroline left my den, you could see the sense of overwhelming betrayal in her eyes . . . Caroline had spotted, with the innocence of a child, the grotesque hypocrisy of which Bouchard was capable.”

It was all part of growing up in a prime minister’s family. By February 1990, his little girl was “out on a date!” Mulroney wrote in his memoirs. “And she’s not yet 16!

“Like all fathers I can’t get used to the idea of my little baby out for dinner with a beau, though it is at times like this that I am especially gratified by the presence of her RCMP detail.”

The security might not have been absolutely necessary. Caroline seems to have been a classic first-born in her easy conformity and hunger for parental approval.

Her father recounts how while the family was preparing to visit U.S. president George H.W. Bush at Kennebunkport, Me., in 1989, Caroline — only 15 — “was busy reading up on foreign policy.”

“While still a teenager, she had already developed a keen interest in foreign affairs and wasn’t going to pass up on the chance to pepper the president of the United States with questions,” he wrote.

Caroline’s was a life experience unlike anything to be gleaned from a seat on the Queen streetcar or a barber’s chair in Lindsay, Ont.

In 1991, in London, the PM was again proud as could be of his wife and daughter, writing in his memoir “my wife and daughter quickly captivated the British capital. They were on the front pages of all the papers almost every day. Mila and Caroline met royalty, served as star ambassadors for Canada.”

In his memoir, Mulroney recounts having told U.S. President Bill Clinton, on a trip to Washington shortly after the latter took office in 1993, that Caroline was at Harvard.

Moments later, the PM found “the president proudly telling Vice-President (Al) Gore about Caroline, which pleased Al greatly because his daughter is also at Harvard.”

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The Mulroney children were nothing if not a credit to their parents — “magnificent,” in the words of former cabinet minister John Crosbie, “well brought up and well-mannered.”

In fact, Caroline Mulroney seemed disinclined to challenge the expectations of achievement her parents surely had. She thrived at the best of schools, became a lawyer like her father, married into an elite American family, did well in business, and had four kids of her own, just like Brian and Mila.

If Caroline Mulroney is a typical first-born — and her bio suggests she is — she will be reliable, conscientious, structured, cautious, controlling.

The notion of her as an agent of any great change — as her campaign and supporters claim — would seem to challenge everything she’s ever done in life.

By contrast, it is younger brother Ben — middle children being the more likely rebels or creative types — who eschewed the family business of politics.

The prime minister is quoted in one biography as saying that of all his children it was Caroline who was most like him “in her mindset.”

If so, and a political career has always been among her goals, Caroline Mulroney grew up watching two of the most polished political professionals in Canadian history, two masterful networkers, and a couple known for both retaliation against critics and for private acts of extraordinary generosity.

The game of Who-is-Caroline-Mulroney? requires at least some comparison to the life of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, another child of privilege and political pedigree.

Analysts, when Trudeau the younger entered politics, regularly compared him against his father, Pierre.

Yet it turned out, by the PM’s own appraisal, that he followed more in his maternal line, was more emotionally akin to his MP grandfather Jimmy Sinclair than his more austere father.

His crucible had come from his mother as he found himself, roles reversed, basically parenting her, while still a boy, through mental breakdown and crisis.

Those seeking to understand Caroline Mulroney should likely pay as much attention to her mother as her father.

It was her mother who was born to a sense of bourgeois entitlement; her father was an electrician’s son who always retained a touch of the arriviste.

A Mulroney biographer quoted Mila Mulroney as saying that she always went to her father when she wanted something. “My mother would say, ‘What do you need it for? And I’d say, ‘I don’t need it, but I want it’.”

Still, it was Caroline’s mother who often was the tougher parent.

By Gratton’s account, Mila sometimes bridled at her husband’s cooing at their kids while on foreign trips.

“Hello, nice baby. Hello, nice baby. That’s all you can say,” she once complained when he refused to discipline one of the boys.

Mila — who met the 33-year-old Mulroney at just 18 and gave birth to Caroline at just 20 — was to some eyes as ambitious and political as Brian.

“She works a room like no one else,” the Star’s Catherine Dunphy wrote after following Mila Mulroney in 1988.

“Watch how she and Brian plunge into a crowd after one of his speeches. She hugs, greets, connects. It seems natural and unrehearsed, yet inevitably she reaches the door held open by one of the plainclothes Mounties at the same time as her husband. She always looks delighted to see him.

“Always there’s one more enthusiastic wave to the crowd before she is whisked away, like a rock star. There’s no question: she’s good at her job.”

Caroline Mulroney has a lot to live up to.

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