Late at night on 4 June 2009, Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell quit Gordon Brown’s Cabinet and called for the PM to go.
The newspapers we were reviewing on TV at the time were hastily put aside, now hopelessly out of date, as we turned our attention to the breaking news.
My prediction was that if Foreign Secretary David Miliband also resigned, Brown was done for by morning. He didn’t, and Purnell’s political career died in vain as the PM limped on.
There was a feeling of Déjà vu as I watched Scotland's Labour leader Anas Sawar trash Keir Starmer. Had a Cabinet minister followed him, the PM would have been done for. No one did, and Starmer limps on.
If anything, Sawar's blitzkrieg shored up the PM’s position, with bookies Ladbrokes pushing the odds for a 2026 exit from 1/7 back to 1/4.
It was an act of desperation by the Scottish leader, having been a shoo-in to be the next First Minister at the General Election 18 months previously when Labour had more than 35 percent of the vote north of the border.
Labour is now in third place in the Holyrood elections behind the SNP and Reform, and Sawar blames the PM for two-thirds of his voters deserting him.
But his failed coup has given the Labour Party a pause to consider whether toppling the PM and plunging the country into chaos is really such a good idea.
And with the boiling fury over Peter Mandelson now an angry simmer they may wonder whether Starmer deserves quite such a bucketload for making the appointment.
As I’ve said here before, I fired Peter Mandelson long before Tony Blair and Keir Starmer got around to it. It had nothing to do with any scandal. He was just being silly.
He was the Sunday People’s political columnist when I headed up the paper’s political coverage and we were delicately negotiating our way through a new editor’s first week.
I fired Peter Mandelson long before Keir Starmer got around to it. This is what I learned - Nigel Nelson
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She didn’t like the column Mandelson had written and asked for another, which she was entitled to do. I relayed the news to Mandelson, hoping he would cut her a bit of slack while we got the measure of her.
He wasn’t a happy bunny. “Can you guarantee that I will keep my job if I write a new column?” he asked. "No," I replied. “But I can guarantee you will lose it if you don't."
That's when he got silly. Instead of sucking it up, knuckling down, and seeing how things played out, Mandelson dug his heels in and said the column he had done was the only one he was going to do.
He phoned me later to ask if it was going in. "No, Peter, of course not. Your services are no longer required."
I might have been a bit terse with him at that point because I was given just two hours to fill the space he'd just so irresponsibly vacated.
It took some years for our relationship to recover. But I confess to being pleased for him when his career seemed to bounce back as our ambassador in Washington.
Appointing him was always going to be risky, but it is only with hindsight that it becomes apparent what a catastrophic mistake that was.
Mandelson can be charming when he chooses, but also manipulative, cunning and ruthless.
Traits which would be failings in others could be seen as strengths when handling someone as unpredictable and mercurial as Donald Trump.
Plus, Mandelson’s experience as a former EU Trade Commissioner, given that getting a US/UK trade deal across the line was the priority.
That’s the case for the defence, milord. But it doesn’t thwart the one for the prosecution: that Keir Starmer is nevertheless guilty of a disastrous error of judgement.
The government documents surrounding the appointment, when they are eventually revealed, are likely to show that due diligence failed. That is now a given.
It appears to have failed again when No 10's former chief spin doctor Matthew Doyle was given a peerage despite his friendship with a paedophile.But the PM has been rightly banging on since the Mandelson scandal broke about how Jeffrey Epstein’s victims must be front and centre of our concerns.
If the documents show that they were, the PM has a sporting chance of survival. If they don't he’s toast.
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