Thread by @ShippersUnbound

On 9/11, I was in Brighton, covering Tony Blair's speech to the TUC for the Sunday Express. I was out and about in the Lanes when the first plane hit the towers. I got a call from Yvonne Ridley (later captured by the Taliban) who said a plane had hit the World Trade Center

I didn't understand the significance but then headed back to the press room at the Brighton Centre. I was watching the live TV broadcasts when the first tower collapsed. I felt sick. I've never known a silence like it when it happened, followed by a collective intake of breath

The place then became a babble of voices as a bunch of professional wordsmiths tried to make sense of what they were watching. I remember burbling something about how the effect on America, the psychic political shock would be like a combination of Vietnam and Watergate

A better journalist than me cut me off and immediately said: "This is Pearl Harbor." And they were right. It was immediately the perfect analogy, used in every paper the following day

Blair went on stage and explained that he could not make the speech he had been intending to make and was heading back to London. The gnarled union curmudgeons, who had turned up to boo him, applauded instead

I was covering defence and diplomatic affairs for the paper, as well as politics, and by now the editor and the newsdesk were calling to get those of us in Brighton back to London. We grabbed our bags and fled

The press room was at the back of the Brighton Centre and I was there when Blair came off stage and headed for his own car, which was parked to the rear. I've been privileged to see politicians at moments of great drama but the look on his face that day has always stayed with me

Blair was supreme at this point, an unassailable leader at home and abroad, but he looked ashen faced, beweildered by events, frankly a little scared. Perhaps he knew it was the pivot point of his premiershnip, of his life

I can still see @afneil trying to talk to him, to ask him a question about what was happening and what would happen next. Blair just looked startled, trying to brush him off. He put his hands in the air, he had no idea. He stuttered something and was gone

The rest of us raced for the station, but there was quite a wait. A few of us repaired to the bar. We lost track of time. I remember charging to the platform only to see the train depart without us. There was only one thing for it, we returned to the bar

By now the phone was going from HQ: "The editor wants you in the planning meeting, when are you back?" I muttered something about security blocking us from leaving the centre until Blair had left. "I've missed the train, I'll get the next one."

This call went on for so long that I again lost track of time. I ran to the platform. Another train pulled away without me. I remember the late Colin Brown grinning from the train as it accelerated away from me

This time I sat on the platform, made sure to catch the next train, went back and prattled on, claiming the Pearl Harbor analogy as my own. I quickly felt it would be the most important day of my career, the one which would shape all others

I went on to cover the Iraq War from US Central Command in Qatar, made several trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. For the better part of a decade 9/11 was the world's formative experience. But we were wrong. The aftershocks of the crash of 2007/8 have been with us longer

So that was my 9/11. A day of tragedy and farce. Along with the 45 minutes I spent with Boris Johnson a week after he had been knifed by Michael Gove, those few flickering seconds of Blair are the moment in my career when I have seen real vulnerability in a senior politician