In most good heist movies there is always a moment when the bad guys fall out. A disagreement over splitting the loot turns to violence. More usually, one of the gang, fearing the Old Bill, sings like a canary. What you do not expect is to see the Lavender Hill Mob played out inside Downing Street. The cash for honours investigation is reaching its climax. Assistant Commissioner John Yates and his Scotland Yard colleagues are said to be confident of bringing charges under both the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act of 1925 and for perverting the course of justice. The question is: who will be charged?

Lord Levy, the prime minister’s highly successful fundraiser, is most clearly in the frame and is protesting, through friends, at being hung out to dry by Downing Street. Things have become so desperate that the old charge of antisemitism is being bandied about. As a political outsider he is more dispensable than Tony Blair’s aides and officials. What seems clear, however, is that Lord Levy was not acting alone. Hence the police are toying with the charge of “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice”. Mr Blair has said he sees nothing wrong in giving honours for party service and, according to his spokesman, “the fact that they had supported the party financially could not conceivably be a barrier to their nomination”. Mr Blair’s inner circle appears to have acted in the same spirit, forgetting the small matter of the law.

The prime minister through all this seems strangely serene. Political leaders have different ways of dealing with times of crisis. Margaret Thatcher enjoyed a tipple and John Major watched cricket. Mr Blair prefers to dash around signing international agreements, hosting policy discussions and doing just about anything to avoid his rather large local difficulty. Perhaps he thinks that if he ignores it, it will go away. It will not. The endgame is approaching in the cash for honours inquiry. And it will be one of the defining and damaging moments of Mr Blair’s premiership.