The knock on the door that woke Des Smith at his home in Wanstead, East London, on Thursday, April 13, this year will for ever be etched on his memory. It was 7.20am and during the school Easter break, so he did not need to be up early. Just weeks away from retirement, he was looking forward to a quiet day with his wife Delia, also a London head teacher, and teenage son.

But instead he was faced with two plain-clothes officers who read him his rights, telling him he was being arrested under the 1925 Honours Act.

They warned him: 'We will let you go upstairs and dress, but do not try to climb out of the window and escape. We have got someone round the back. Don't embarrass us.'

Mr Smith recalls: 'My home is a big Victorian house. If I jumped out of the window, I would be falling 30ft on to concrete. I said, 'I won't be jumping, I promise you.'

'Then we had to go to the school to get my laptop. I thought they were going to drop me at home after that. But they said they were taking me to Stoke Newington police station.

'We arrived there about 8.30am. I thought I was going to answer a few questions and leave quickly. But to my amazement they put me in a cell while they tracked down a lawyer to represent me.

'It is quite terrifying when the State gets hold of you. There is a dreadful logic about their procedure, booking you in and putting you in a cell. You are utterly powerless. It feels like they are showing you the instruments of torture. It is quite nerve-racking.

'I think Tony Blair should now see the same instruments of torture. As a citizen I am equal to Tony Blair. I need him to be treated the same way.

'If you are sitting in Chequers surrounded by your advisers, it might be quite a comfortable interview.

'I demand that Blair is arrested at 10 Downing Street at 7.20am, that he is taken to a police station - hopefully Stoke Newington, which is a very unpleasant Bastille-type place - and treated in the same way that I have been treated.'

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