Will it be today, or tomorrow, or just after Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday? Perhaps it happened over the weekend and we will not be told until this morning? Or might it not occur until after Christmas? All this uncertainty is torture.

For the political world is simply agog about the when, the whether and the where of Tony Blair’s imminent encounter with Acting Assistant Commissioner John Yates (aka “Yates of the Yard”) and other members of the team investigating the alleged “cash for honours” scandal (since they are dealing with politicians, I presume that these officers are known as the Lying Squad to colleagues).

The chatter over when the meeting might take place has attracted such frenzied speculation that at one stage the BBC was apparently offering a small financial bounty to the first reporter to uncover it. The corporation would surely have been wiser to promise £100 to any employee who spotted its chairman in the company of senior ITV executives.

The when, however, matters less than the whether — will it be a standard interview, with the Prime Minister treated as if a potential witness to a crime, or, instead, held “under caution” as a possible suspect, a future defendant.

With that in mind, the where has attained extraordinarily symbolic significance. Never mind “education, education, education”, it is “location, location, location” that defines new Labour enemies obsessed with this saga.

Will it be in some discreet corner, such as Mr Blair’s office in the House of Commons, or, better still, might Inspector Yates and company have to motor up the countryside to the privacy of Chequers? The diehard Blair haters pray that the detectives will insist on arriving at No 10 in the middle of the day and the full glare of publicity.

They fantasise about men leaping from police cars, smashing their way into Downing Street and leading out the Prime Minister clad in a Guantanamo Bay orange jumpsuit with his hands taped behind his back (the hard Left’s dream), or at the head of the kind of chain gang once common in Alabama with Lord Levy and Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s chief of staff, in the middle and then Ruth Turner, a Downing Street aide, bringing up the rear (the hard Right’s favoured scenario).

I suppose that almost anything is possible with this surreal story. It is proving less Inspector Morse than Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther movies. It has lasted for months and could be with us well into 2007. Yates of the Yard has spoken to 90 people so far.

There must be authors who have written best-selling biographies of Hollywood stars who have worked with less material. It has also leaked more than any public venture since the launch of Henry VIII’s Mary Rose which, unlike this ludicrous inquiry, at least had the decency to sink.

On Saturday this newspaper told how the Home Office had failed to meet targets for cutting crime set out by the Treasury. With the amount of time that the Metropolitan Police have wasted on the subject of political funding, asking whether their commissioner told the truth at the time of the Stockwell shooting, or seeking to be sure that a drunk driver who was not the Duke of Edinburgh was responsible for the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, it is amazing that anyone has been convicted of anything in our capital city.

The essence of this affair was revealed, at minimal expense, ages ago. In the run-up to the past election both the Labour and the Conservative parties fretted that they were short of money. So they went back to those who had previously donated large sums. They sought loans because they believed they would secure larger support that way and it had the extra benefit that a loophole in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 meant that as long as a loan was “ commercial” (a term that was never defined, partly because it would be impossible to do so with any precision) it did not have to be declared to the Electoral Commission.

This implied that the loans did not have to be mentioned when four people who were already on record as having provided Labour with funds were nominated to the House of Lords Appointments Commission. That body, having learnt about this ploy, declined to award them their ermine.

The behaviour of the major parties was sly, cynical and hypocritical (none are criminal offences). The Liberal Democrats acted more honourably in this instance but then again they happily pocketed £2.4 million from a man, Michael Brown, about whom they knew almost nothing and who is today incarcerated.

Media exposure has already forced the loophole to be closed and made it far harder for anyone who has ever provided money to a political party to be honoured even if there are other reasons why they should be considered for a peerage.

The real issue of substance — a political one — is whether the taxpayer will be milked for yet further state aid to parties that have proved incapable of attracting members and that are already subsidised more than dozens of rural post offices.

Yet, thanks to Yates of the Yard and company, the taxpayer has already been fleeced again. The Acting Assistant Commissioner’s past triumphs include the trial of Paul Burrell, butler to the Princess of Wales, which collapsed at the cost of £1.5 million when it emerged that a key witness, the Queen, had not been approached (this may explain why so many interviews have been solicited this time) and the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? fraud trial that cost more than a prize that was never paid anyway and after which no one was imprisoned.

How much will this episode end up costing before it too concludes without anyone being put behind bars?

Times Recommends

• Caesar & Cicero: Balls & Mandelson
• The anti-sex brigade are the worst
• Small act of charity won’t change the world