If Katy Gallagher always seemed that little bit different from most politicians it could be because for the first half of her political career, it looked like she wasn't really trying.
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In 2001, as a 31-year-old single mum still struggling with the tragic death of her partner, she joined the Labor ticket for that year's election literally to make up the numbers.
The campaign was more about personal therapy than political ambition, she says, and pulling herself out of the hole she'd been plunged into four years earlier when the father of her unborn child was killed as he rode his bicycle on the south coast, by an elderly driver who police had been trying to take off the road for years.
Gallagher says she never expected to be elected but after her Labor Party mates told her more women were needed on the Labor ticket and she rode the wave of Jon Stanhope's growing popularity straight into the Legislative Assembly.
A year after she was elected, Stanhope found he couldn't manage with just four ministers and Gallagher, a former CPSU official, found herself elevated to the front bench by virtue of being the "least insane" of the backbench crop.
Despite a baptism of fire when a child abuse scandal blew up in her face in late 2003, she proved herself a safe pair of ministerial hands, a valuable commodity in accident-prone ACT politics, in the Education, Youth, Family Services and Industrial Relations portfolios and began to climb the ladder.
By the time Stanhope had his wings clipped in the 2008 election, Gallagher held the Health portfolio, would soon pick up Treasury and was Deputy Chief Minister because, as she tells it, she was the only one in the Labor caucus who consistently got along with its famously cranky leader.
This rise almost to the top by the accidental politician with the heartbreaking back story, minus all the usual backstabbing or ugly ambition, is an attractive narrative but it doesn't tell the whole tale.
Gallagher, who studied political science at the ANU, worked hard on that first campaign in 2001 and she was busy from the moment she entered the Assembly, raising her profile and mastering the nuts and bolts of parliamentary politics.
As she concedes today: "I don't do things by half measures."
Early on in the piece and from the backbench, she was flying her left wing colours putting forward pro-choice and industrial manslaughter bills and could be found participating in "fun" charity stuff around town.
A high-profile brawl with conservative Liberals who labelled her a "part-time minister" after Gallagher returned from maternity leave in 2007, did her image as a modern everywoman no harm in what is probably Australia's most female-friendly electorate.
The incident highlighted one of Gallagher's strengths, her very ordinariness. Here was a woman in her thirties, tackling the tough task holding down a job and then family too and then copping some static at the office for her choices.
Tens of thousands of Canberra women knew exactly how that felt and liked the fact that she stared her detractors down.
It was around this time that people began to talk about Gallagher's electoral appeal.
But it wasn't all fairytale stuff, Gallagher lost paint over one of the most unpopular decision to emerge from the notorious 2006 Costello Review – the closure of 20 Canberra schools.
The Liberals have never – to this day – been able to let go of the charge that Gallagher dishonestly concealed the decision from the community.
But if Gallagher's political life before 2008 period was largely a charmed one, she was fortunate in her enemies with the Canberra Liberals beset by internal strife, poor judgment and bad performers.
With Stanhope forced into minority government by the success of the Greens in 2008, Gallagher had the high-profile Treasurer's job, the poison chalice of the Health portfolio and a united, disciplined and organised Canberra Liberals under Zed Seselja on the opposition benches.
If anything took the gloss off Gallagher's tenure as Deputy Chief Minister and in the top job itself, it was the burden of being ACT Minister for Health.
Hospitals and their funding has been the source of more political strife for ACT Labor and Gallagher since 2008 than any other single policy area, ably aided and abetted by the Liberals and their energetic health spokesman (and now leader) Jeremy Hanson.
There was the abortive buyback of Calvary Hospital from its private owners, the seemingly intractable elective surgery waiting lists, the bullying scandal in Canberra Hospital obstetrics and most damaging of all, the data-doctoring of 2011, again at TCH.
A sneakier political operative would have let someone else take the fall for Health, but Gallagher says her proudest achievements are in the portfolio and it is her performance managing the rapidly growing system, now a $1.1 billion behemoth, that attracted the most personal goodwill from the public.
The departing Chief Minister says even the toughest times, like her family being dragged into the data-doctoring affair, pale in comparison with the child protection scandal of 2003 to 2004 when as a raw minister, she came close to quitting under the strain.
After taking over the top job from her mentor Stanhope in May 2011, she managed to re-invigorate a Labor outfit that had been looking more than a little weary after 10 years in power and with Labor governments going down in flames from coast-to-coast.
Her style could not have been more at odds with the confrontational approach of her predecessor, bringing to the fore Gallagher's other great political strength: the element of doubt.
In an electorate that understands like no other that public policy is hard and getting it wrong is easy, Gallagher - rarely among politicians - exudes the sense that she thinks about the alternatives and entertains the possibility that she might not be right.
It's a disarming trait.
Combined with her whitebread accent, matter-of-fact delivery and friendly personal style it produces the formidable political operator, unrecognisable from the hesitant novice of 2001 who got her party over the line in 2012.
The potency of her presence was acknowledged by her opponents months before that election when the Liberals booked a whole ad break on an early evening TV news bulletin and devoted it all to attacking Gallagher.
The Liberals' research had told them the same thing Labor's said; that Katy G was the best thing the ACT government had going for it.
Until 9.30am on Friday it was still true and the question now for Labor is what is going to do without her.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Ms Gallagher was pro-life. She is pro-choice.
