MOT... passed?

After the MOT failure I took the car to a garage and asked them to take a look at the emissions, on the grounds that they have tools for analysing the exhaust gas so they'll be better able to tell what affects emissions. This sort of worked. They found that by unplugging the MAF, the car will run on a more basic fuelling map that's good enough to get through MOT. So I now have an MOT but still don't really know what's wrong with the car (although it does at least rule out things like excess fuel pressure, or poorly seating valves, etc, and point towards a problem with running closed loop). Given that they haven't actually done anything to the car or identified the issue, this feels very close to a bribe, but an MOT pass is a pass, so I'm not complaining.

More fiddling about on the intake side this time revealed a perished hose leading to the EGR valve (which I'm not using), so I removed this and blocked it off properly in case it was causing an intake leak. I'm not sure this has helped, though I may go back and get them to check the emissions again.

They also pointed out that the wheel alignment was very poor, no big surprise as I haven't done the front end since replacing the wishbones. Perhaps a job for this afternoon.