Is this a battle or a soccer match? BBC headline: "Bannockburn battle to rage again: Scotland's greatest win over England is to be re-enacted and watched by up to 15,000 people on Saturday." Nope, just a reenactment of the Battle of Bannockburn, a "win" for Scotland in 1314.

And a great Telegraph editorial on yesterday's hunting vote and Commons circus, and how Blair's New Labour will use the heavy-handed Parliament Act to bypass any opposition in the Lords: Keeping aside the Government's real motives in banning hunting, there is something instructive about its willingness to use the Parliament Act. Asquith's Liberal government resorted to this extreme parliamentary measure in 1911 to allow Lloyd George's radical Budgets to bypass Conservative opposition in the House of Lords. Those Budgets laid the foundation of the welfare state.

In those days, radical campaigning politicians sought to introduce old-age pensions. Today, Tony Blair's Government deploys the Parliament Act in defence of a few score foxes per hunting season. How Lloyd George and his ideological heirs in the Labour Party must be laughing at the dismal automatons crowding the government benches today.

They pose as modernisers, while indulging their activists back home by tossing them an Old Labour bone; they take time from a crowded parliamentary session, with public services still unreformed and unimproved, to throw up a giant, self-indulgent distraction from the work they were elected to do.

And on this day in 1620, the ship Mayflower, brimming with righteous unhappy Calvinists, left Plymouth, England bound for parts unknown, somewhere off in the east. Does this count as irony? The spot where they spent their last night in England is now a large distillery, the HQ of the Plymouth Gin Company. Excellent for GTs and Martinis, I might add. Here are the "Mayflower Steps."