Coughing, spluttering & loss of power on 998cc engine

Having flown through his MOT on Saturday Bert has decided that he's behaved for too long and seems to be hinting that trouble lies ahead. On two journeys today I have experienced intermitant coughing and spluttering whilst accelerating accompanied by lots of "bunny hoping". It happened once whilst travelling down a country road when the car I had followed for a mile or so turned off and I accelerated off down the road. It happened again having sat in traffic approaching a roundabout, and then setting off from said roundabout. At it's worst the car just didn;t seem to want to go when the engine was put under load, it just seemed to want to die. It happened reasonably briefly on both occassions, and returned to normal running very quickly afterwards. I'm recently back into Minis & Elfs after many years off so am a bit rusty on the DIY fault finding, so any ideas would be appreciated. Many thanks.

Things to check.

Good flow of fuel to carb (disconnect hose, turn ignition on and let fuel run into a jar)
Electrical connections to coil, distributor or dynamo etc. Coil voltage and resistance. Condition of points (including gap) Condition of rotor arm and distributor cap. Connections between coil and distributor (low tension and high tension). Not sure if you can check the condensor but they're cheap enough to change anyway.

I'm sure there's more but that's a start.