It turns out that yesterday's cabinet meeting wasn't the first outside London or Chequers since 1921, as we and everyone else reported (on the basis of information from Downing Street). It also happened in 1966.
In a letter to the Times today, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, the former cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, says that he knows this to be the case because he was there.
The cabinet met in the Grand Hotel in Brighton on the evening of October 4, 1966, the first day of that year's Labour party conference. This "emergency" meeting was called by the prime minister, Harold Wilson, to consider a proposal to activate statutory powers to enforce a freeze on prices and incomes.
The freeze had hitherto been voluntary but had been challenged when the courts gave a verdict in favour of the payment of a pay increase which had been promised during the period of the freeze. The cabinet agreed to activate the powers that had been taken in statute to put the freeze on to a compulsory basis.
For anyone with a keen interest in history, The Times has also published on the front page of its archive website the cuttings from 1921, when Lloyd George summoned his cabinet to Scotland, where he was on holiday, for a meeting to discuss the crisis in Ireland.
"Inverness is thronged, and is immensely interested in the cabinet meeting tomorrow," one report starts. It wasn't quite like that in Birmingham. As Michael White reports, Gordon Brown and his colleagues were watched by a crowd of sightseers, "sometimes as many as six".
