Six months after seizing the top job, a surprising laundry confrontation forced South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill to confront his own vaulting ambition, and the assumptions men make - it is mostly men - about the primacy of their careers over those of their partners and family.

On this particular Saturday morning, he found his two young daughters Lucinda, 7, and Alice, 5, milling with unusual intent in his orbit. Having not yet found the time for a fatherly chat about his new role, he decided this was the moment.

"I said, 'You know I've got a new job', and they said 'Yes'." Both girls recited his new title - "Premier" - and told their dad that, because of his new job, they were seeing him less, which made them feel sad.

"So I said, 'Oh, what are we going to do about it?', and the older one said: 'Well, it was your choice'."

He emits an almost embarrassed laugh before summing up, in his lawyerly fashion: "She just got me right between the eyes."

Weatherill admits he was "shattered" by the undeniable truth, and by the sharp impact that his leadership role had on his family. He sought the counsel of his wife Mel, but acknowledges that she too has paid a price, with her career as an urban planner "being essentially on hold for the last 15 years".

That story answers the perennial question hovering around Weatherill, who 10 days ago stole the national limelight just as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was announcing his Snowy Hydro upgrade with his shirtfront of Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg - will he switch to Canberra?

When Kate Ellis announced she would quit federal politics at the next election, two names immediately stood out as potential star-power replacements: Weatherill, and that of his one-time girlfriend in university days, Penny Wong. Already a federal heavyweight, Wong would emerge as a potential Labor leadership option if she were to swap from the Senate to the House. Weatherill is a stand-out political performer among premiers and the biggest player in the boutique-size world of South Australian politics but few doubt that his skills would travel, if only he were prepared to do likewise.

And there's the rub. The soon-to-be 53-year-old insists he was more surprised by how long Ellis managed to juggle family and politics than by her decision to call it quits.

Speaking to Fairfax Media in his minimalist office high up in Adelaide's State Administration Centre, it is hard to believe that this man who exudes an uncommon gentleness is a political force at all.

In October 2011, a protracted leadership tussle had ended when the former lawyer and son of Labor politician George Weatherill replaced South Australian Labor hero Mike Rann. It had been an unlikely power play in which Weatherill had seduced the dominant right faction into not only abandoning Rann, but into handing over the biggest prize in state politics to the party's minority left faction. The little-known Weatherill then faced a daunting task, learning on the job while also rebuilding his government's dwindling stocks.

Since then he has emerged as arguably the nation's stand-out leader, with a reputation for bold and often unorthodox policy solutions, from his state's participation in the nuclear fuel cycle, to lifting GST to 15 per cent in exchange for state access to income tax revenue, and active support for an emissions intensity scheme.

The self-described "low talker" nominates as his ideal escape from the rigours of public life as "sitting on the couch with my wife, with a cup of tea and a biscuit". While that might involve trash TV, he says lately it's given over to a succession of Netflix series that the couple watch together. "That's the whole point ??? if one of you sneaks off and watches an episode without the other, it's betrayal," he chortles.

More than once I push my digital recorder closer as he pads softly through the issues ranging from his electoral chances, his priorities, his personal values, and his heroes, to "that press conference".

Defiantly boyish into middle-age, Weatherill is a gestalt politician - an admixture of his two political inspirations, the state's legendary 1970s premier Don Dunstan, and the country's most demonstrative, and transformative recent prime minister, Paul Keating. But other influences are discernible too, including the political smarts of Rann, and a certain private reserve reminiscent of the late John Bannon with whom he shares a distinctly South Australian sensibility, and a love of running.

The socially progressive arts-loving Dunstan, he says, opened up his mind to what was possible. "He made the idea of being premier of South Australia just so attractive, the idea that you could change the state for the better and that you could do that with bold strokes is exciting," he says.

But it was Keating's global imagination, his facility for painting pictures with words, his sense that power was never an end in itself but a tool for getting things done that defines him now.

"I like the notion of big ideas, and publicly advocating for them and trying to win the public debate, I mean, we're very different types of politicians, but I find that type of thing inspirational," Weatherill says.

That courage to break the shackles was evident in his recent move to resume government involvement in electricity generation with a new gas-fired power station and a suite of other security measures. As was the aggressive partisanship when needed. Critics say he was forced to act after failing to plan for the energy insecurity inherent in Labor's ideological rush to wind and solar.

Weatherill shares something else with Keating, too. Having rolled a popular sitting leader, he now needs to defy the odds to secure a staggering fifth consecutive Labor victory. Can he win?

"I'm relaxed about the Liberals' choice of leader," he says of the Liberals' Steven Marshall, in response to the question. The caustic burn in that understated comment is typical of Weatherill's yin-yang quality - his ability to calmly yet coldly flay his opponents.

In this sense, he is the polar opposite to Keating. Where Keating could be disliked for his toxic tongue, Weatherill has made a virtue of civility. Critics call it artifice, or worse, intellectual arrogance.

Either way, that gentle equanimity cracked pretty spectacularly last week when Weatherill, riled at Canberra's baiting over its run of blackouts and desperate to justify his "go-it-alone" plan, attended a Frydenberg media event in Adelaide. What followed was compelling television, further marking Weatherill out as a force to be reckoned with.

But it was high risk too.

The doyen of the South Australian parliamentary gallery, the Seven network's senior political reporter Mike Smithson, has seen it all over his 23 years. He had no doubt that Weatherill's rage was as planned as it was dangerous - a sure sign of the trouble the Premier knows he's in over energy security.

"Jay's performance at the press conference was unconventional to say the least, but people saw it for what it was," Frydenberg says, branding it "confected anger and grandstanding to deflect from our Snowy Hydro announcement".

"As Rudyard Kipling once said, 'if you can keep you head when those about you are losing theirs ...'" he says.

Polls suggest South Australians blame the Premier for the blackouts. Weatherill challenges that, arguing that voters are not interested in who is at fault so much as who is going to fix it.

It's a classic politician's line, repackaging legitimate public anger over a catastrophic failure into a clamour for his plan to resolve it. Yet in Weatherill's case, it is also an opportunity to advance an ideological argument consistent with his left faction roots: South Australians he believes, had never hankered to privatise their electricity assets, and many still believed it was the core business of the state government to keep turbines operating.

There's no question the energy failures have been devastating. So much so that Smithson thinks the next election should be a lock for Marshall, suggesting if the Liberals cannot win strongly next March after the blackouts and after so long under one party, they should give up for good.

"You would have thought he [Weatherill] is on a hiding to nothing, but as I always say, never write off the Labor Party in this state," Smithson says. "They just know how to win."

Weatherill admits he was more forthright with Frydenberg than he had planned but says South Australians, weary with ridicule, are glad their premier has finally "called out the bullshit" from Canberra.

"I think it also plays into something deeper about South Australia; first we're told we can't build cars, then we're told we can't be trusted to build a canoe; and then we get told we can't keep the lights on - and there's a limit to how many times you can attack a state like that and expect people just to cop it."

There's no doubting Weatherill's anger at Turnbull personally, whom he accuses of having dumped his support for renewables and a carbon price on purely political grounds. But he goes further, accusing Canberra of forgetting its responsibilities.

"Openly speculating that we can't keep the lights on, what an extraordinary message for the Prime Minister of Australia to send about one of the component parts of the Commonwealth ??? we're having our reputation damaged by somebody that should be promoting Australia - this is a section of Australia, in case he's forgotten."

But if Turnbull is worried, it isn't showing. As recently as Thursday, while attacking the Victorian Labor government's failure to keep the Hazlewood power plant open, Turnbull cited the SA example in Parliament: "It is clearly determined to head down the same road as South Australia, where we know, following more than a decade of Labor government, the state has the least reliable and the most expensive electricity in Australia."

It's another truth that hurts.

Did Weatherill sex up his outrage at Frydenberg to foment an us-and-them battle with Canberra, as he'd done over Holden, over submarines, and on the River Murray?

The Premier dismisses that with a counterfactual statement: "If they [the federal government] in December had promoted an energy intensity scheme, we'd be standing next to the Prime Minister claiming to be joint authors.

"People talk about it as if its politics, but you know, flip that on its head, I mean, what would people have me do? Roll over on Holden, roll over on the River Murray, roll over on submarines? Even if I was inclined to do that ... it would be politically suicidal to not do what I've done."

Weatherill's instincts are born of a particular culture of grievance in the central state from where there's never been a High Court appointment, nor a South Australian prime minister - at least not one holding an SA seat in the parliament at the time.

Smithson, who was at the Frydenberg media call, was gobsmacked by Weatherill's intervention. "It was no accident, he virtually gate-crashed that press conference, he wanted to get a national headline ... I've said to him both publicly and privately that I would have thought you've ruined any chances of a future handout from a federal minister coming here with deep pockets, they just won't do that anymore ... effectively it's South Australia, you go to the end of the queue," Smithson says.

But the Premier, back in calm mode says, the relationship with Canberra remains intact. "Look these are all grown-ups ??? I was taught very early on that in politics, you always run the best line, you always run your best position and you maintain it, because ultimately, if you're right, people will return to it."

He would say that wouldn't he?

In an era of umbrage that some have dubbed the "shouty belligerent age" the quietly spoken Weatherill is an oddity. One that has proved to be quite a stayer, for now at least.