Assuming it was full of junk, I tried to pull the trunk out of the way but I couldn’t move it, so I opened up the lid and gasped.

Whenever the builder boyfriend is away I do battle with clutter. I’d gone through acres of horse tack in the boiler room and was now up the back stairs in the rabbit warren of rough-and-ready back bedrooms which haven’t been used since the last family, who also ran this place as a guest house, made their children sleep there to free up the nicer rooms.

The trunk was stuffed with scrapbooks with every single article I ever wrote as a political correspondent pasted in

When we moved in, the BB took a sledgehammer to the rabbit warren, which included a strange bathroom with no hot water, knocking out every partition until we had two big rooms that could be of more use. Then we filled them with all our old clobber.

Waving away cobwebs and falling through broken floorboards, I was rationalising all the boxes and crates full of stuff I’d brought from one attic to another over the years.

I had to start throwing some of this stuff out. Did I need my first guitar, my first ice skates and my old school boater? Old school photos, a box of recorders, for heaven’s sake, every kind of vintage cuddly toy including Kermit the Frog, and all my A-level history essays…

After emptying boxes for hours on end, distributing books and pictures throughout the house, I decided to push the rest of my life into corners… and that was when I saw a very large trunk I had not noticed before.

I was amazed to find it was absolutely stuffed with huge black scrapbooks with every single article I ever wrote as a political correspondent pasted inside.

My parents had paid someone to do it, their cleaner I think. I opened a book at random and the article carefully pasted on that page was about New Labour sleaze.

Memories came flooding back as I turned the pages of the books of newspaper cuttings. Every article told its own story, plus the one behind it, which is the way I got the story, and what was happening in my world as I was getting it.

One memory in particular then returned, prompted by the books, and by what was on the news that day. I was quite young and starting out at Westminster and had written an article about the Blair government that Mandelson didn’t like.

I recall that usually you got told off by Alastair Campbell if you’d written something that contravened the narrative.

As it happened, Campbell, a keen cyclist, used to mistake me for the relative of a cyclist called Kite, so he was quite well disposed towards me on that basis.

I never did tell him I wasn’t related to Stan Kite because the arrangement seemed to work so well and I didn’t really feel I ought to disappoint him.

On this occasion, Mandelson for some reason took umbrage and rang someone at head office of the newspaper I was working for and demanded, ‘Who is this Melissa Kite?’ And when they explained I was their new junior political correspondent, he intimated words to the effect of wanting me removed from my post.

I’m glad to say the editors told him where to go, and the exchange was reported back to me by colleagues in a flurry of excitement, as though I had passed an initiation rite.

Shortly after that, I saw Mandelson in the queue for popcorn at the Curzon cinema in Chelsea. He was with his boyfriend and they were wearing matching chunky Arran sweaters. He didn’t recognise me – the girl he’d tried to get the sack – so he continued being rude to the girl behind the counter. Now what was he saying?

That was it. I remember. He wanted Maltesers. He was shouting the odds about why she didn’t have any Maltesers. ‘But I want Maltesers!’ he kept saying.

While the attempted sacking baffled me, the Maltesers incident shocked me to the core. I remember thinking this chap was going to come an awful cropper one day.

Mandelson was shouting about Maltesers. ‘But I want Maltesers!’ he kept saying

I shut the lid of the huge trunk with a bang.

A few days later, the BB got back from London, his mission to buy a new truck with his insurance payout complete, with a nice Mitsubishi Trojan awaiting its MOT before he flies back to collect it in a few weeks’ time.

I was pleased because he had a Warrior before and it suited him. But a Trojan was fine. It had a warlike feel to it and connotations of machismo.

We were sitting by the fire that evening. ‘The thing about Mandelson…’ he said. And off he went, giving me his analysis, which was astute as always.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I snapped. He kept going so I shouted: ‘I have encountered these people you know.’

‘All right all right!’ said the BB.

‘It’s just that it takes me back,’ I said, apologetically. I wanted to tell him how I survived all sorts of strange escapades during that era, but I didn’t, because he doesn’t like to hear anything like that. He gets protective and cross.

When I’m old I’d like to sit down and write it all for posterity. Maybe I’m old now. My ten years at Westminster seem a long way away.

I wish I had kept a diary. But as I looked into that trunk I realised that it’s all there, in my black books.