Was this when coalition love first bloomed?

At the height of the MPs expenses scandal, the then Commons Speaker Michael Martin – himself under siege – agreed a meeting with the three main Westminster party leaders.

Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg met in a crisis session with the Speaker in his Commons rooms.

Senior Tory sources have disclosed that when the meeting convened, Gordon Brown offered what we now know to have been his stock-in-trade.

He immediately produced his papers listing in large bold letters his own multi point system for redeeming the reputation of the Commons.

As was his wont, Brown would brook neither questioning nor challenge to his edict. Exasperated, Clegg and Cameron found themselves cast in alliance against the bulldozing Brown.

My sources say that this was the first time that they began to forge coherent political co-operation and in conversations afterwards realised that they had enough in common to do some serious talking.

Will history one day judge that the intransigent over-bearing Brown became the unwitting midwife of the eventual birth of coalition politics in Britain?