TONY Blair has appealed again and again for a rethink. Stephen Byers has issued countless pleas for clemency. Teesside MPs have gone down on bended knee.

But it was a largely implacable steel magnate who appeared before the Commons' trade and industry select committee this week. Corus chairman Sir Brian Moffat basically warned that the entire survival of the company was at risk if he did not axe more than 1,000 jobs on Teesside and over 6,000 across the country as a whole.

It was essentially a grim message from Sir Brian. MPs and Government could plead, but Corus lived in the real financial world. ''It's no use just making steel - we have got to make money,'' Sir Brian told the committee.

For weeks now, Corus has pointed to the unfavourable pound/euro exchange rate and to the falling demand for steel from the UK manufacturing industry. Presumably, UK manufacturing includes cars made in this country.

I only mention this as, after the committee hearing, Sir Brian and entourage left in the sort of car not made of British steel - a luxury Japanese-made Lexus.

NORTH-EAST ''home rule'' campaigners are an excitable lot. You'd have thought they'd seen enough false dawns with New Labour to know better.

Recent remarks by Gordon Brown and David Blunkett seemingly in favour of directly-elected regional assemblies, sent the devolution lobby into yet another seventh-heaven. Cue the usual bucket of cold water from Tony Blair at Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons this week.

Newcastle Central MP Jim Cousins asked when the North-East would get what the Scots already had - its very own ''political voice''.

Back came the reply. ''I understand the case for a regional assembly,'' said the Prime Minister, before delivering a paean of praise to the regional development agencies (RDAs).

Mr Blair likes these RDAs - especially One NorthEast which, he told MPs, had so far safeguarded 11,000 jobs in the region. They're also unelected which presumably makes them much easier to control than independent-minded politicians.

SO we won't have the presence of sleaze-buster general Martin Bell in the forthcoming electoral contest in Hartlepool.

Ex-BBC war correspondent Mr Bell told me that he had 50 letters about whether he and his trademark white suit should grace the Hartlepool hustings. ''But the only one I have had from Hartlepool came from the Conservative candidate who suggested I should stay away," said Mr Bell. ''Well, I will respect his wishes."

Sounds like Tory prospective candidate Gus Robinson reckons he's got Mr Mandelson licked already!

WITH today's column, I bid a very fond farewell to The Northern Echo after two years representing this fine part of the world in the Commons Press Gallery.

So it was a nice surprise last night to get a phone call from Labour MP Ashok Kumar wishing me well in my new job on a morning paper with a distinctly Yorkshire flavour.

Despite holing beneath the waterline the MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland's great campaign to get a statue of Captain Cook erected in Trafalgar Square within weeks of starting, Dr Kumar and the rest of the region's MPs have taken their treatment so well that none of them have said they're glad to see the back of me.

Not to my face, anyway.

Indeed, the Rt Hon Alan Milburn paid me the greatest compliment last night with a classic Milburnism. While he feverishly concentrated on his speech to be given in Glasgow today, he was informed that it was my last day.

So touched was the Secretary of State for Health by the news that he could only bring himself to say absent-mindedly: "So when does he finish, then?"