GEORGE Clooney can forget trying to make a sequel to his Ocean’s 12 film out of the antics of the gang behind The Great Tonbridge Robbery. This is fast turning out to be far from the perfectly executed crime that it first appeared to be.

Nor is the public’s fond perception of the robbers as a glamorous bunch of rogues who got away with £50 million without harming a soul or leaving a clue likely to have any resemblance to reality. These were dangerous criminals who have made mistakes and I believe their clumsy errors will eventually lead to their undoing.

The weekend brought speculation that the discovery of firearms and balaclava masks, together with a some of the cash found in a white van left in a car park in an Ashford hotel was really a brilliant ruse on the side of the robbers.

Many believed that far from making a potentially fatal error, the robbers had laid a false trail designed to throw the police off the scent. It was tempting to believe that the Tonbridge Gang’s execution of the crime and their manipulation of the police proved their criminal genius.

Leaving an elaborate series of false leads is the stuff of fiction that excites the public imagination, but I simply don’t buy this interpretation.

For a start, it would be almost unheard of for robbers to lay a false trail in a crime of this size. I certainly never encountered more than the most rudimentary diversions by any gangs and they were either quickly discovered or proved to be valuable evidence in their own right — as I suspect this latest find will prove to be. Laying a false trail is fraught with danger. Who would want to drive around the Kent countryside, which is crawling with police, in a van packed with guns and banknotes from the biggest robbery this country has ever seen? If the driver had been stopped for speeding or a routine search no jury would believe he didn’t know what he was carrying. A more likely explanation is that something went badly wrong for the robbers in disposing of the cash.

It could be that they had paid people to dispose of the guns and the other robbery paraphernalia and for some reason those who were supposed to pick up the accessories failed to do so. Perhaps they were spooked by the massive police response and decided to walk away from the vehicle rather than risk arrest. Perhaps they feared that the impact of the £2 million reward would draw some unwelcome attention.

The sheer size of this reward will tempt the underworld into breaking ranks. Two million is a big payday, particularly when the informant knows that he won’t have to give evidence, nor explain in court how they knew about the raid, and the police and insurance company will never reveal who picked up this reward. Someone who used to run with this gang and has been left out of the Tonbridge job may just feel bitter enough to turn informant. Others on the fringe of the gang may also be tempted.

Consider, too, the “other” supposed false clues: first, leaving the van at Ashford, the cross-channel terminus, suggesting that the gang and the money were heading for the Continent. The one thing no self-respecting armed criminal would do would be to drive guns through the Channel Tunnel, particularly at a time of heightened security when the inside of every vehicle was being checked.

The second puzzle concerns the £1.3 million found in polythene bags in the white van. Did the gang dump millions in new banknotes because they realised the authorities knew the serial numbers so they could not spend it? If the gang wanted to dump this cash they would not have left it in a van; they would have incinerated it.

Instead, they have provided police with a forensic goldmine; the bags holding this cash, the weapons, and the flak jackets and balaclavas also found in the van will be coated with DNA. So too will the metal cages that carried the money, and the abandoned cars.

This was a gang who were obviously forensically aware — they took the precaution of burning out cars they travelled in, so it is astonishing that they have made such a basic mistake as abandoning the white van. DNA is not just found in blood and semen, it is likely to be present in hair or even flakes of dandruff inside the balaclavas.

A discarded cigarette end or a piece of gum may yield DNA in saliva traces. It is almost impossible to avoid leaving some identifying trace.

Although the other vehicles were set alight, this does not guarantee destroying all the DNA.

The vehicles themselves will have a history that may be traced. Even if they were bought for cash at an auction, fingerprints that may lead to their owners could be found on a forgotten place, such as the oil filter. And the number of the vehicle could have been picked up on the thousands of CCTV cameras around the country, narrowing the police search still further.

I never set much store by e-fit pictures of suspects. In 30 years I never had one that was any use in finding the criminal.

It might eliminate people, for example the colouring of the men who posed as police officers who abducted the warehouse manager shows they are not Colombians or Russians, as some had speculated.

It looks to me like a local firm who have pulled off a job that is out of their league.

This is a fast-moving investigation and we may have to wait some time before we know the answer. But I doubt it will lead us to a criminal genius; more likely the search will end at the door of a clever crook who simply got into something that was, in the end, too hot for him to handle.

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