Another update....long.
OK,
I`m just thawing out.
The fuel pump was tight. It`s a new (ish) item by the looks of it.
Anyway, the fuel smell was primarily from the offside so I began squeezing my hands down below the wiper motor as far as I could trying to feel for moisture. The air intake pipe was fouling my chubby hands so I grabbed some pliers, loosened the spring clip and removed the pipe from the engine end.
This allowed a bit more room for exploration.
Now, if you follow the pipe from the filter assy mounted on the offside suspension tower there`s a pipe that goes to what I presume is a pressure relief valve (it had 3 bar stamped on it). One of the pipes that emerges from the valve is a kind of S shape and it attaches to a bronze coloured nipple on the offside of the intake manifold.
This pipe was loose, so loose in fact that as soon as I touched it it came off and fuel started haemorrhaging at quite an alarming rate at the intake end. I quickly put my hand over the air intake to kill the engine.
On examination, the end of the pipe was very worn. I got a scalpel and cut off around 15mm of pipe. Using a pair of long snipe nose pliers I managed to get the spring clip a couple of cm down the pipe and eventually (after some choice words!) managed to get the pipe back on the nipple and the spring clip on as good as I could.
A quick rebuild later and everything appears to be OK. There`s still an alarming amount of fuel around the place so hopefully that will evapourate overnight.
I sat in the car with the screen demist on for a good ten minutes and apart from the clothes I was wearing stinking of petrol (superplus, annoyingly) I think I might have cracked it!
I`ll update tomorrow evening.
Mike, another huge thank-you for your pointers, are you sure you don`t want to move down to Wiltshire or Hampshire for a while?