BRITAIN:Downing Street played down apparent tensions between Gordon Brown and Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman yesterday as the Electoral Commission handed its file on Labour's secret or concealed donations to Scotland Yard.
As the Metropolitan Police took the first steps toward a second high-profile inquiry into Labour Party funding, Number 10 insisted it was business as usual for Mr Brown amid speculation that he could become only the second serving prime minister - after Tony Blair - to be interviewed as a witness in a criminal investigation.
A spokeswoman said: "The prime minister is fully focused on the business of government and has made clear he is keen that all the issues regarding party political donations are investigated thoroughly."
Despairing Labour MPs, meanwhile, were focused on the continuing damaging fallout to the party coinciding with a new opinion poll giving the Conservatives an 11-point lead over Labour.
Coming just months after the conclusion of the controversial "cash for honours" inquiry that blighted Mr Blair's final period in office, justice secretary, Jack Straw, yesterday described the latest affair as "mind-blowing".
Mr Straw also raised questions about the actions of recently appointed fundraiser Jon Mendelsohn, who discovered the unlawful arrangement by which developer David Abrahams contributed more than £650,000 (€910,000) through proxies but failed to advise Mr Brown, Labour's ruling executive or the police.
"It's not legal, and it's not appropriate," Mr Straw told the BBC radio Today programme yesterday. And it was not, he added, "just a matter of profound irritation but profound anger to everybody involved in the Labour Party", 99.9 per cent of whom, he said, were "completely straight and upstanding".
As cabinet minister Peter Hain admitted failing to register a £5,000 donation to his deputy leadership campaign - this one from Mr Mendelsohn - the chairman of the parliamentary Labour Party, Tony Lloyd, said people could not understand how Labour found themselves on the wrong side of laws they themselves had introduced.
The good news apparently for Labour is that, if the police decide to launch a full-scale investigation, it might not prove as protracted as the "cash for honours" inquiry.
The bad news, according to some legal experts, is that criminal charges should be easier to prefer in respect of a practice which the prime minister himself has already acknowledged was unlawful.
In the first instance an inquiry is likely to focus on Mr Abrahams and the four proxies he used to make donations while concealing his identity as donor, along with former Labour general secretary Peter Watt and any other Labour officials or politicians charged with ensuring the party's procedures complied with electoral law.