When politicians are called a safe pair of hands, it can mean they are utterly dependable, or they're so boring they can't possibly get into strife.
With Warren Truss, the Nationals initially reluctant and now retiring leader, both descriptions fit.
When Mark Vaile suddenly quit as leader after Labor came back to power in 2007, the party was supposed to go for generational change.
Instead it chose Truss, who was nearly eight years older than Vaile.
What the party - and the nation after he became deputy prime minister following Tony Abbott's 2013 election win - got was a calm, deliberate and thoughtful leader to whom charisma was a stranger.
Truss, 67, came from a pioneering Lutheran farming family from around Kingaroy, Joh Bjelke-Petersen heartland.
Farming was his life from his mid-teens. So was joining organisations, local and wider. These included the Rural Youth Organisation, of which he became national president.
He was big in the Queensland Grain Handling Authority and the Queensland Graingrowers' Association. For seven years he was mayor of Kingaroy.
After Bjelke-Petersen was finally forced to retire in 1988, Truss stood as the Nationals candidate in the by-election for his state seat of Barambah.
In an upset, he was beaten by Trevor Perrett of the ultra-right Citizens Electoral Council. It was largely a protest vote against the Nationals for getting rid of Bjelke-Petersen.
Truss soon found a better seat and a wife.
Clarrie Millar, long-standing Nationals member for the federal seat of Wide Bay, was retiring. With Millar's help Truss won a tough preselection contest against Peter Slipper and in 1990 went to Canberra.
By then he'd married Lyn Caswell, Millar's electorate secretary.
In his maiden speech he laid out his philosophy: "I believe that government policy should support the family, encourage initiative and reward achievement."
His first moment in the spotlight came in 1994 when he helped skewer Sports Minister Ros Kelly over "sports rorts" - claims of pork-barrelling with sports grants.
Truss went into John Howard's ministry with Customs and consumer affairs in 1997 and entered cabinet with agriculture in 1999. He also held infrastructure, regional development and trade towards the end of the Howard era.
In 2005, when Vaile replaced John Anderson as Nationals leader, Truss became his deputy.
But Vaile quit at the end of 2007, saying it was time for generational change, which was interpreted as backing Peter McGauran. However the Victorian, who was also soon to quit politics, wasn't interested.
So Truss it was, though he had to be persuaded.
"I was a reluctant starter," he said later.
The first Labor term was a slog and the 2010 election, which delivered the minority Gillard government, did little to boost the Nationals.
But 2013 brought the party's best election result for a generation, with four seats reclaimed.
As deputy PM and minister for infrastructure and regional development, he managed the tricky job of being a good coalitionist without appearing a Liberal lap dog. His relations with Tony Abbott were cordial and businesslike.
At times he influenced policy outside his portfolio - notably the government's rejection of a foreign takeover of Graincorp and an increase in the foreign shareholding allowed for Qantas.
His calmness under fire was periodically shown when he stood in for Abbott. Opposition attacks bounced off him like pebbles off a castle wall.
So did reports - especially after he was hospitalised with colitis in late 2014 - that the mercurial Barnaby Joyce was poised to take over.
However, he didn't handle the messy attempted defection of Ian Macfarlane from the Liberals to the Nationals well and, as a conservative Queenslander, was less comfortable with Malcolm Turnbull than he had been with Abbott.
Share
