The first time I came across Boris Johnson was when he was hiding in the press office at Tory party conference in Bournemouth 2006.
The Conservative MP, then a shadow education minister, was escaping the media frenzy after committing four gaffes in as many hours.
“Oh God, it’s like Liverpool all over again,” despaired a Tory aide with memories of a previous controversy that resulted in Johnson visiting the city to apologise.
As he made his break for freedom - reporters and photographers chasing after him along the seafront - he shouted over his shoulder: “Do you not think you’ve slightly over-egged this?”
By the time Johnson finally quit as Tory leader yesterday his personality flaws were widely known.
His loose relationship with the truth and his carelessness with everything he touched had finally caught up with him.
But for years he had charmed and entertained, buoying them with his sense of optimism.
His election as Mayor of London in 2008 cemented his image as a “Heineken politician” who could reach voters that other Tories could not.
By then, I was a reporter with the Evening Standard so spent much of my time following him round the capital.
He talked a good game on the Olympics, on crime and on transport - and regularly travelled around the globe banging the drum for London.
But the warning signs were already there.
He faced allegations of cronyism for appointing political allies to plum public roles.
He fathered a daughter, Stephanie, with art dealer Helen Macintyre while still married to long-suffering wife Marina.
Another lover, Jennifer Arcuri, was allowed onto three trade missions after he intervened, while her companies received public funds.
He wasted £43m on a Garden Bridge that was never built and millions more on an estuary airport that never made it off the drawing board.
When the London riots broke out he refused to cut short a holiday in Canada to help deal with the mass civil disturbance.
So when he arrived back in Westminster in 2015, and rose through the ranks first to Foreign Secretary and then as Prime Minister, I was more sceptical than some.
That scepticism turns out to have been well placed.
It will be years before we know whether his biggest achievement in office, delivering Brexit, will be worth it.
What we do know is that it - and he - divided the country.
He retained the capacity to win people over. On the day I joined the Mirror, he texted me warm congratulations and suggest we bring back the poem of the day.
But I also saw the darker side - his face etched with fury as he faced the Commons after the Supreme Court ruled his bid to prorogue Parliament was illegal.
Weeks later he succeeded in getting a general election.
We were banned from the Tory battle bus as he shied away from tough questioning - including by memorably hiding in a fridge.
He won a historic landslide as key voters came out to get Brexit done and keep Jeremy Corbyn out of office.
There were further insights into his ruthlessness as he - and his acolytes - launched a belligerent campaign against the media.
One of the more uncomfortable moments of my career was his communications chief dividing journalists into those deemed acceptable, and those not, in the Downing Street entrance hall.
But the pandemic brought with it a truce, of sorts, as we all stumbled at the scale of the crisis ahead.
The initial Blitz spirit may have been misplaced.
I often think back to that early press conference when Johnson told us all he had been in a hospital shaking hands with everybody.
At the same press conference, he was asked about keeping care homes safe, the first of many huge Government failings.
We all struggled on through the pandemic, with we at The Mirror doing our best to hold the PM to account on behalf of our readers.
I was taken aback to get a call from a contact in April 2020 telling me they had spotted Dominic Cummings, the PM’s closest aide, hundred of miles from No 10 in County Durham, while the country was in strict lockdown.
With the help of our North East correspondent Jeremy Armstrong, and eventually our colleagues at The Guardian, we gradually pieced together the jigsaw.
It was an arduous process, not least because we were met with obfuscation and denial by Downing Street, taking their lead from their boss.
But eventually we met our high threshold of proof, and published. The next day a source emailed to say they had also spotted Cummings in Barnard Castle.
The PM stood by him, telling us that his top aide had “acted responsibly and legally and with integrity”.
Some interpreted it as loyalty, but actually it was about protecting himself. Either way, the damage was done.
I think we all emerged the other side of the pandemic slightly different people.
But like millions of others I felt I had done my bit in keeping others safe by sticking to the rules.
So when I was shown a piece of evidence in October last year that suggested Downing Street staff had been holding parties during lockdown I struggled to believe it.
But over the following weeks I spoke to contacts, checked details, corroborated events, and the story came together.
No 10 repeatedly insisted that no rules had been broken and no parties had taken place.
Johnson himself denied the story in the Commons when challenged by Keir Starmer.
But we kept plugging away, breaking more stories about lockdown parties.
A week later ITV published a bombshell video of another Johnson aide laughing about the law-breaking gatherings.
Johnson - still insisting he hadn’t done anything wrong - was forced to announce an inquiry and Partygate was born.
Part of what kept us going through the weeks of No 10 and Johnson denials was knowing the PM’s record of lying to wriggle out of trouble.
I had no idea the impact the story would have when we first published - certainly not that it would lead to him becoming the first sitting PM to be found guilty of breaking the law.
Some at Westminster had told me it was a “bubble” issue and that nobody would care.
But they did, because it summed up everything that we all knew Johnson was about.
Right until the end the PM thought of Partygate as trivial.
But it was never about cake or bubbly. It was about there being one set of rules for him, one for everybody else.
The Sue Gray report vindicated every single line of our journalism.
I’m not pretending that Johnson did everything wrong.
He delivered Brexit as promised - even if the jury is still out on the success of it. He encouraged the phenomenal vaccine roll-out programme. He was right to stand resolute in supporting Ukraine.
But Partygate put him in the last chance saloon with Tory MPs.
Whatever the next scandal had been, if he lied about it, his integrity was beyond salvation, and the end was inevitable.
And when the Chris Pincher scandal broke, he did exactly that. All trust had gone.
The final curtain has finally come down on the great showman.
