No sensible person can honestly believe that New Labour made a corrupt bargain with either Enron or Arthur Andersen.  Since my relationship with the party is that of a forsaken lover, cynics might argue that I would be the last to know. But, from my position of detached ignorance, I assert that there was neither an explicit nor an implied compact between the government and the companies.  I am equally sure that the help that the opposition received before 1997 - both in money and in kind - did not make ministers feel unreasonably well disposed towards the two donors after the election was won. There was no political or legal wrongdoing - at least on the part of the politicians. Their corruption was intellectual.  Labour's involvement with Enron was small beer - though that may be an inappropriate metaphor with which to describe the sponsorship of one of those ghastly champagne receptions which the party organises from time to time. The important relationship was between ministers and Arthur Andersen.  Just at the moment when the new government was worrying about how it could finance the improvement in public services, the mighty firm of international accountants explained how lead could be turned into gold.  The prime minister wanted to believe that the private finance initiative would solve his problems. So the alchemists - who had failed to notice that DeLorean was a crook - were rehabilitated as prophets of the third way.   Arthur Andersen's timing was impeccable. The PFI report was published at the moment when the government wanted both to hold down public expenditure and demonstrate its faith in private enterprise. Recruiting private companies to build and run hospitals was an ideal way of demonstrating that New Labour was business friendly.  Tony Blair actually believed that private management would improve the performance of the public sector. The real complaint against the PM is that, despite the evidence, he still refuses to accept that the simplistic and self-serving Arthur Andersen prescription is wrong.  He defends their conclusion by citing work on the same subject by PriceWaterhouse Coopers, a similarly prejudiced source. At the weekend Stephen Byers told a Labour conference that the government would not allow vested interests to stand in the way of PFI. Does he not realise that vested interests invented it?   John Prescott, following hard on Byers's heels, tried to justify PFI, by announcing that it was simultaneously both the most prudent and the only way of financing hospital building. Neither of   those conflicting claims can be justified.  There was no reason why the government could not have financed a new hospital programme out of public funds. It chose not to. And PFI - like the mortgage schemes with which Prescott recklessly compared it - is a very expensive way to join bricks to mortar.  Most families buy their houses with a mortgage because no alternative is available. Only Labour wilfully increases the long-term costs. A PM who is so proud of reducing the national debt can hardly boast about mortgaging hospitals. To him PFI is more than a financial expedient.   It represents all his hopes of entwining the private and public sectors of the economy into a combination of compassion and competence. That idea comes into the same category as Thomas Hardy's poem about the oxen kneeling in their stalls at midnight on Christmas Eve. It is such a charming thought that we can only regret that it is sentimental nonsense.   It has been a bad week for the reputation of hybrid companies. Edexcel - the exami nation board which sets unanswerable questions - is both a limited company and a charity. Although it ploughs its profits back into education it operates like a commercial company in order that it can respond to the theoretically redeeming pressure of free enterprise.  It now admits that it neglected investment in new technology - the characteristic error of obsession with short-term profits.  And one employee attributes all its mistakes to replacement of "the education ethos" with a need "to compete for market share". Arthur Andersen and Tony Blair please note.   The PM cannot fail to notice, but he will not change his mind. To accept reality would be to deny the theory on which New Labour was built and by which it was governed. Socialism, in all its forms, has to be rejected and the competitive market embraced.  When the evidence suggests that the pursuit of that general principle produces a worse result than the acceptance of ancient truths, the hard evidence is ignored. It is not the sort of scandal about which the opposition complains.  They are part of the conspiracy. But it is a far worse crime than accepting a few thousand pounds from a crooked energy company and using it to finance a party.