WHEN he was heckled by hunting supporters at the Labour Party conference, Tony Blair missed a golden opportunity. Instead of asking the rather lame question: "Are there any more of you out there?'', he should have said something like this:

"Thank you for your protests which, of course, I note. But I have to tell you that foxhunting will be banned according to the overwhelming wish of the democratically-elected House of Commons and the desire of a very substantial proportion of the population, if not quite an absolute majority. And I will be proud that, under my leadership, hunting with dogs will join all the other cruel sports which, over the last two centuries, have become incompatible with civilised values.''

Not only did Mr Blair not say anything like that, but earlier, despite being close on hand, he didn't bother to vote in the hunting debate. So much for him as a "moderniser". The credit that posterity might give Mr Blair for heading the Government that outlawed hunting will be misplaced.

Meanwhile, please allow me to make good two key omissions from the points about foxhunting raised here last week.

It is said that 16,000 jobs depend directly on foxhunting. Since 1950, the number of people employed on the land has plummeted from almost a million to around 110,000, of whom about a third are part-time.

Were horses retained to save the jobs of the tens of thousands made redundant by the tractor? Was the combine harvester shunned out of compassion for the legions who reaped, stooked, stacked and threshed? And whatever happened to milkmaids?

Agricultural change continues to destroy jobs - 60,000 between 1990 and 2000. Did I miss a Liberty and Livelihood march to keep them?

Liberty is now the chief pillar in the case for hunting. Yet we all accept many limits to our personal freedom. While the Englishman's home might be his castle, he can't build it where he wants or alter it significantly at his own whim. Resisted by the post-war Tories, planning laws are generally valued as a bulwark to protect town and country.

Since 1983 all drivers have been obliged to wear seat belts. Yet this straightforward, life-saving measure was held up for years by the same personal-freedom argument now deployed for foxhunting. Closer to that, there is a whole raft of legislation governing our treatment of animals, once not thought to have any rights. And the perception that they do has sometimes brought change without any push from the law. The traditional circus, for example, is virtually obsolete because people recognise that training an elephant to sit on a stool is an affront to its dignity.

Introduced by the Normans, pleasure hunting has had a good, long run for its money. But the run is now over. It really is a simple as that.

Deservedly skewered - by reader Teresa Sutton - for "howlers'' in my piece on the Duchy of Lancaster, I have the complete, though embarrassing, answer. Rearrange as 1267 the figures I carelessly typed as 1627 and the history I outlined falls correctly into place. It was in 1267 that Henry III created his younger son Edmund Crouchback Earl of Lancaster, simultaneously gifting him estates, including land around Pickering, that became known as the Duchy of Lancaster.