If Tony Blair does leave Downing Street on May 31 next year, it won't the first time that the Sun's acute political antenna have twitched ahead of the rest of Fleet Street.
Rupert Murdoch's tabloid - still the best-selling daily paper in the UK by almost one million copies a day - has a long track-record of Mystic Meg-style political predictions.
The paper correctly forecast the date of the 2001 general election. Then, when the foot and mouth outbreak meant the poll had to be postponed, it got the new date too.
That seriously peeved the then Mirror editor, Piers Morgan, whose best Blair scoop up to that point had been breaking the news that Cherie was pregnant.
Morgan's autobiography, The Insider, is full of bile for Downing Street's apparent hotline to Wapping - not least since the Mirror is a self-proclaimed Labour paper.
That, of course, is why Number 10's spinners seem to take it for granted - it's more important to them to stay onside with the Thatcherite "White Van Man" tendency the Sun's readership is supposed to represent.
More recently, the Sun got a full digest in advance of the Hutton report.
Rivals suggested that exclusive had less to do with a great contacts book and more to do with a factory worker at the printing plant passing a copy on to the paper.
When the political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, retired at the end of last year, the succession battle was written about in the same tones as the Blair/Brown handover.
In the end, his long-standing deputy, George Pascoe-Watson - the man behind today's scoop - got the job.
There were rumours earlier this year that the editor, Rebekah Wade, was unsatisfied with the paper's lack of scoops since then. Today's front page should make Pascoe-Watson's life a little easier - at least for the time being.
