The Sketch: The four shadowy businessmen at the centre of the Tube PPP scheme

Gwyneth Dunwoody rose out of the remotest parts of the back benches like a small tropical island in a great green sea. She had been given an amendment by the Speaker (hats off!) in the debate on the Public-Private Partnership for the London Underground. It's the first time this issue has been debated in the House of Commons.

Members reacted magnificently. Nearly two dozen turned up. Even Helen Jackson turned up. Normally she doesn't bother, even though she's on the Transport sub-committee. She hopes, so it is said, to swipe Mrs Dunwoody's position as chairwoman of the committee when it's stuffed with suck-ups, waxworks and government bench-monkeys later this year.

Mrs Dunwoody was magnificent. Never in recent times has such a senior Labour figure denounced such a senior ministry with such vigour.

She told the House that the more evidence was taken the more it was clear the Treasury was driving the PPP. As anxieties about the scheme multiplied, the Treasury refused to come to the committee and explain the thinking behind it.

At this point, Helen Jackson intervened with the shiftiest of shifty points: It was, she said, "particularly difficult, if not impossible, to get a balanced view without evidence from Treasury". This sounded sympathetic at the time, yet in print it's an attack on the committee's ability to form a judgement. With the one remark she ingratiates herself with anti-Treasury backbenchers and with the Treasury.

Mrs Dunwoody unscrolled the charge sheet. The contracts are written in a very subjective way; there is no real transfer of risk to the private sector; the contractors will be able to rewrite their terms after seven years and the Government has no right of intervention. There is no public interest exclusion clause. She said the Government was in danger of creating another Railtrack. Considering the Labour crowing over the defeat of Railtrack, this charge is the most damaging.

Tom Brake made some equally trenchant points for the Lib-Dems, among them the fact that the contracts give the financiers, the lenders, the bankers of this venture a panoply of powers to take up to 100 decisions concerning the works to be undertaken.

In a dangerous build-up of gas, Geoffrey Robinson inflated himself and addressed the House. He claimed to be Treasury minister closely involved with the origins of the PPP. This was before he was obliged to resign as Paymaster General.

Why? Money problems. Lots of money problems. He's got a character problem as well as a personality problem.

The Government was in the right, he declared. These anti-PPP cynics had advisers and consultants who'd say anything they were paid to say. You fat fool, someone said (I think that's how it was phrased), the Government had their own advisers who were saying what they'd been paid to say too! Idiot!

Mr Robinson, undeterred, revealed that the whole PPP project had been dreamt up by four businessmen and John Prescott. Labour's Harry Cohen pounced. Four businessmen? Four shadowy businesmen? He wanted the names of these businessmen so the House could analyse whether they had vested interests in a PPP.

Mr Robinson agreed to reveal the names. But didn't. Four businessmen. What a scoop. The preposterous Mr Robinson is worth his weight in something and it certainly isn't gold.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com