The question everyone asks when they know you are writing a book about Penny Wong is whether she will ever be prime minister, and if not, why not.

The simple answer is that she is in the wrong house – the Senate – when prime ministers must sit in the House of Representatives. But couldn’t she change house?

The better answer is that she has never aspired to the job. Many people have urged her to consider it over the years, including some of her closest allies and friends. She has been entirely consistent, rejecting the idea in private as in public. Partly this is due to her fear of the impact of prejudice: she judges the nation not ready for a gay Asian woman as prime minister. There are two sides to this concern. On the one hand she fears the electoral impact – the percentage of Australians who would change their vote because of her. On the other side, she fears what it would mean for her personally. As she puts it, “Why would I do it to myself and my family?”

Wong is assumed to be more conventionally left wing than she really is, and somehow above or outside the dirty business of politics

But it is also a keen assessment of her own talents, limitations and abilities. She has learned to campaign, and to perform for the media and the public, but it will never be her natural or preferred game. It drains her. As prime minister, selling the government message and performing in public would be an unavoidable and dominant responsibility.

Nevertheless, some wonder whether she will reconsider if the party’s success seems to depend on it, and when her children are older. Comments John Faulkner, phlegmatically, “How long are you going to condemn her to sit in parliament?”

Perhaps because she is different from other politicians, Penny Wong tends to be what one of her staffers described as “a floating signifier” – a symbol with no agreed meaning. She absorbs meaning as well as projecting it. In these populist times, people tend to see her as what they wish her to be, rather than what she is. Thus, she is popular – at least with lefties – without being populist.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Popular without being populist ... Penny Wong grills finance department officials. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

There is a cult of Penny Wong. There is a Twitter account devoted to her eyebrows. She is assumed to be more conventionally left wing than she really is, and somehow above or outside the dirty business of politics when one of the central points of this book is that she is decidedly in the room, inside and of politics. One of the first things she published as an adult was the On Dit article in which she argued that professional political representation was the most important service. That remains her vocation.

Yet the cult of Penny Wong has enduring power because it is not built on fiction. Intellectually, Penny Wong is clearly head and shoulders above most of her colleagues. She is one of the most significant political talents of our times – or, as she might put it, “of our generation”. She is both principled and pragmatic. In all of Labor’s troubles since she entered the Australian parliament, Penny Wong has emerged from each stage with her reputation enhanced and her influence increased. Her political judgment has usually been acute.

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We tend to idealise politicians who appear different from the pack, and then tear them down when they inevitably disappoint. Despite her talents, it is easy to imagine this happening to Penny Wong if she were in the top job. Racism, misogyny and homophobia aside, the aspects of her character that constitute her chief weakness – the sometimes ill- judged aggression – would likely be more apparent. She is charming, but also cutting. She is fiercely intellectual, yet also emotional. Her Senate colleagues talk ruefully about her temper. One told me that “repair work” had to be done after a Wong display of temper against her own.

Whether or not Wong has a clear-eyed view of her weaknesses, she certainly understands her strengths. Her natural strength is policy and strategy. In other words, she is well suited to the leadership of the party in the Senate.

So Penny Wong will almost certainly never be prime minister. Yet she will lead. The opposition is now dominated by her allies. Albanese is leader largely because of her support. Asked why she backs him, she says she believes he has the capacity for a strong relationship with the Australian people. His principles are visible in his support of gay rights, long before it was popular. As well, she credits him with “holding the government together” during the years of minority government under Gillard.

“I think that’s sometimes taken for granted. We would not have stayed in government without Albo. Gillard certainly cut the deal with the independents, but he retained the majority in the House. That was by dint of his capacity, his procedural understanding, his rhetorical capacity and his personal relationships.” In caucus, she says, Albanese is “consultative and strategic”. She thinks his leadership will evolve into an election winner.

And, around Albanese, Penny Wong’s allies and collaborators are grouping. Her alliance with Mark Butler is enduring, and important to the party. In addition to Jay Weatherill heading up the election review, Tim Gartrell, the man who ran the same-sex marriage campaign, is now Albanese’s chief of staff.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Labor leadership team: (L-R) Senate leader Penny Wong, deputy Senate leader Kristina Keneally, opposition leader Anthony Albanese and deputy opposition leader Richard Marles. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Against this, some in the parliamentary party speculate that Kristina Keneally’s ascent to the position of deputy leader of the opposition in the Senate is not necessarily good for Penny. Keneally replaced Don Farrell in that position. Despite all their differences over same-sex marriage, Penny Wong never had to fear that Farrell aspired to her job as Senate leader. Keneally, on the other hand, is an ambitious contemporary of Wong’s, just a few weeks younger, a former premier of New South Wales and a good media performer. Despite being from the right, Keneally backed Albanese to be leader, and he insisted on her promotion to the frontbench, making a colleague from the right, Ed Husic, stand aside to give way. Keneally is now shadow minister for home affairs, up against Peter Dutton. Farrell also had to make way, despite earlier making it clear he wanted to keep the deputy’s job, and thinking he had the numbers to do so. Largely, this was about gender balance, with Albanese and Richard Marles as leader and deputy leader in the lower house. The two women in the Senate were to maintain balance in the leadership team, as Plibersek and Shorten had epitomised before the election.

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Wong rejects any view of herself and Keneally as rivals. They are allies, she says, and Keneally has earned her place. “She is a very good performer. I think she knows how to throw a political punch. She’s got political courage ... I think it was important for the Labor party to have another woman in the leadership.” Others, perhaps falling into the misogynistic trope that senior women must necessarily be adversaries, suggest that for the next three years Wong may have to look over her shoulder. The stability of the arrangement is one of the questions surrounding Labor’s immediate political future.

What happens if Labor doesn’t win the next election, expected in 2022? By then Wong, at 53, will have been in the Senate for 20 years – a long and exhausting run. Will she quit politics if Labor fails next time around?

She doesn’t answer the question.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Black Inc Books

She says her father was the member of the family who used to construct long-term plans. “I remember always thinking that he had five-year plans and seven-year plans, and I just did the next thing, and then the next. You can have all these plans, and then life does something different and you have spent all this mental energy on complex plans that are entirely in your head … That sounds a bit fatalistic, but it’s also a sort of weariness, I think, that comes with being 50.”

• This is an extract from Penny Wong: Passion and Principle, the biography by Margaret Simons. Published by Black Inc. Books. In stores 1 October.