Matt Carter, the former general secretary of the Labour party, was responsible for organising the delivery of Labour’s successful 2005 general election campaign and is currently the managing director of the London office of Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates.

Presumably it was Matt Carter who authorised the £500,000+ payment for the slogan “Forward, not back” to the same Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates in the run-up to the election. Shortly after the election he joined Penn’s polling organisation in the UK. Typical feather-bedding by a politician at other people’s expense – nothing special.

It was Carter of course who wrote to rich wannabee peers telling them that any loans would not have to be declared. It was Carter who drew up the “commercial loan agreements” which Labour is now unable to re-pay. Obviously his letters, emails and agreement documents are of particular interest to Yates of the Yard and the investigators from Operation Ribble.

He is at the heart of the “cash for peerages” and is expected by many in Westminster to be the fall guy for Blair and Levy’s scam. So it is tragic that he has had four laptop computers stolen from his office in London.

The theft from the Bloomsbury offices of Penn, Schoen & Berland, the Washington DC-headquartered consultancy where Matt Carter is managing director, was reported to police in Holborn on October 9. It is not known what data was kept on the stolen computers.

He was one of only three people said to know the full details of secret loans worth GBP14 million made to the party. The others were Tony Blair and Lord Levy, Labour’s most high-profile fundraiser.

Officers at London’s Holborn police station revealed details of the theft from Carter’s office… The four computers went missing over the weekend prior to October 9… Carter’s office is only one of a number of subsidiary firms owned by the international WPP agency which share an address at 24-28 Bloomsbury Way. Only Carter’s office reported a theft. No other firm at the address reported anything missing, according to the police file..

Carter has made no formal admission that he has been questioned by Yates’s team, but sources close to the investigation maintain he has been questioned on “more than one occasion” on what he knew of the GBP14m raised by Labour from private backers before the last general election.

Yates’ team is known to be using the same software and equipment that the FBI uses to recover deleted data from hard-disks. It is not clear if the lap-tops had already been examined by the police in the way that the computers of Sleazy Levy and Des Smith have been. Following on from Levy’s office fire Guido worries for the offices in Downing Street.