So Alan Milburn is back in the Cabinet, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Perhaps he will become a familiar figure around Pickering.

The Ryedale market town is a focal point of extensive Yorkshire estates held by the Duchy, more than half of whose 50,000 or so acres are in the White Rose county. They include much moorland around the Heartbeat village of Goathland, once part of a vast hunting forest held by William the Conqueror. It was when the Tudor king Henry III appointed a son Earl of Lancaster in 1627 that the property gained its Lancaster tag.

Many medieval monarchs hunted from Pickering Castle. In 1975 our present Queen became the first reigning sovereign for more than 500 years to enter the castle, where she met 76 local Duchy farmers and their wives, assembled in the inner ward.

Alan Milburn took the Duchy Chancellorship as a courtesy title. The irony of a New Labour "arch moderniser" adopting this Ruritanian guise to return to Government should not be overlooked. Mr Milburn's declared role is to plan Labour's election strategy. As a correspondent to Hear All Sides has astutely observed, this means he will be taking his publicly-funded salary in dubious circumstances, since elections are not Government business.

But Mr Milburn could do worse than apply his modernising mind to his official job. For the Duchy is a strange beast.

It is often stressed that the Queen pays the income of Princess Anne and the Princes Edward and Andrew from her own pocket. The money comes from Duchy of Lancaster profits. So if these belong to the Queen, how come the Duchy is technically under the control of a Cabinet Minister, now Mr Milburn?

Philip Hall, author of Royal Fortune: Tax, Money and the Monarchy, has pointed out that while the Duchy income goes to the Queen, Palace assessments of the Queen's wealth exclude the value of the Duchy's land and investments. Kenneth Clarke, a previous DoL Chancellor, confessed he was puzzled by the status of a "private estate" apparently regulated by the Government.

According to Hall, the anomaly arose because, for centuries, monarchs used the Duchy income for government rather than for personal spending. He believes that once the Crown became detached from government the income should have gone to the Treasury. Two 19th century attempts by Parliament to achieve this were blocked by the monarch.

Of course, Ken Clarke left matters exactly as he found them. We can be sure Mr Milburn will do the same.

By coincidence another New Labour moderniser is also in Pantomime Land. Or something close to it: Scarborough's Peasholm Park. The park lies within the defunct Manor of Northstead. And it was by applying to become "Steward and Bailiff'' of this non-existent Royal estate that Peter Mandelson quit Parliament.

Ludicrously barred from resigning by an Act of 1623, MPs must instead apply for an "office of profit'' under the Crown, for which purpose the redundant Northstead Manor has been retained along with the Chiltern Hundreds. But hey, doesn't the absence of profits render the applications null and void? Perish the thought that Mr Mandelson could be denied his true "office of profit'' in Brussels.