Lord Levy was celebrating his 62nd birthday in Oxford on Tuesday evening with his daughter Juliet when he was interrupted by the trill of his mobile phone.

It was a call that would leave the prime minister’s normally garrulous tennis partner and chief fundraiser uncharacteristically dumbstruck.

“He was with his daughter when he got the call to say that they (the police) would like him to come in by appointment on the Wednesday to be arrested,” said a friend last week.

Levy had expected to be interviewed by police ever since The Sunday Times broke the loans for peerages scandal earlier this year. But the word “arrest” was a bombshell. “You can imagine how he felt; it was his birthday,” said the friend.

“Lord Levy was in Oxford and then all this happened and he could just not believe it — even his lawyers said there is no way they can do anything like that.”

But they did — and Levy was ordered to report to Colindale police station in north London the next day. “It came out of the blue — there was no warning whatsoever,” said the friend.

Returning to London that evening Levy braced himself for the storm ahead. He was not, however, going to let this inconvenience change his schedule: a meeting with Sir Philip Green, the recently knighted retail billionaire, and Alan Johnson, the education secretary, was kept in his diary for 5pm on Wednesday but the police had other plans. “When you are arrested you can lose your liberty for up to 72 hours,” one lawyer said last week. “It makes no difference whether you are a plumber or a lord. It’s very levelling.”

Colindale police station is the antithesis of the grand Hampstead and Westminster palaces that Levy normally inhabits. A functional modern three-storey block on the wrong side of the M1, its grim surroundings have been made all the more depressing by a fire in nearby council flats.

Levy drew up at Colindale in his blue Jaguar just before 8am. He must have been quite a sight for the blank-faced desk officer who greeted him from behind the protective glass and fake marble counter in the station’s reception.

His slip-on loafers had a shine to compete with the Jag and his single-breasted dark blue suit was so immaculately tailored that it could only have come from Savile Row. A crisp white shirt (with plenty of cuff), a patterned red silk tie and white handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket completed the look.

As Levy made his way across the station’s scuffed floor he was accompanied by Neil O’May, his lawyer. O’May is one of the country’s leading criminal solicitors and represented Sion Jenkins, the former school teacher whose conviction for bludgeoning his stepdaughter to death was recently overturned.

It is not clear whether the two men made use of the six blue metal chairs that are bolted to the floor and overlooked by Crimestopper posters as they waited. But after only a few moments, officers from Scotland Yard’s specialist crime directorate escorted them upstairs.

Following Levy’s walk through the station’s grubby magnolia corridors, he was eventually seated in an interview room and a tape recorder was switched on.

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