On-camera Gordon: “It has been very good to meet you – and you are wearing the right colour today. How are your grandchildren? A good family. Good to see you.”

Off-camera Gordon: “You should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?” “Sue’s I think.” “Everything she said – she’s just a bigoted woman.”

It was 10 years ago today that the man we used to call the Prime Mentalist insulted one of his own voters. Our original report of Niall Paterson’s hot mic scoop is here. Gordon’s misery was later compounded when he, followed by the press pack, went to her house to beg for forgiveness, was seen head-in-hands on the Jeremy Vine Show listening to his words played back to him and later that day sent every Labour Party supporter a grovelling apology. He lost the following general election.

It was one of those incidents, as when Emily Thornberry tweeted her snide picture of the English flag draped outside a house, when traditional Labour voters saw the contempt in which some in the party held them. The collapse of the Red Wall a decade later is a consequence of those attitudes…

N.B. That incredible day’s developments are all here.