THE countryside is once more under siege.

The foot-and-mouth epidemic is a disaster which transcends the divide between town and country.

When farming gives way to agribusiness, we all pay the price in the end.

Is there any daylight to be glimpsed through all the gloom?

Only that it relegates the great hunting debate to the margins of politics, where, in my view, it properly belongs.

And that the situation is so grave that, even with an election imminent, the parties for once are not daring to play politics.

Last week's Prime Minister's Question Time was perhaps the first in nearly four years worth attending from start to finish.

It was sombre and serious, benefiting the occasion, and without the usual name-calling and blame-laying of the political amphitheatre.

It takes a crisis of unusual proportions to bring us to our senses.

One effect of it has been to silence the speculation about an April general election.

I still expect the Government to go for May 3.

Everything that they do, from the budget statement to the billboards, is predicted on it.

There is little talk of anything else among disciples of the New Labour 'project.'

One of the minor victims of the foot-and-mouth crisis was the White Knight party, which should have been held on Saturday in the Tenants' Hall at Tatton Park.

A splendiferous evening was planned, with a full house of 360 supporters and entertainment by Rosemary Squires and David Soul.

We called it off the day before, and were surely right to do so.

This was no time to be celebrating, with the farm fires rising into storm clouds of such magnitude.

It had always been my preference anyway, when the parliamentary term was over, to avoid public occasions and to fade away discreetly with the job completed, but the partying is to be re-scheduled.

PARLIAMENT is in its final weeks.

When it is over I lose the initials after my name, my political coach turns back into a pumpkin, and I surrender the platform of this column which I have so greatly valued since June 1997.

It has saved me from having to write news releases.

I have tried to keep it truthful and discursive, as fair to all as is humanly possible, and without the clamour and acrimony of the party battlefield. I very much hope that this Tatton tradition continues.

People have even started sending farewell messages

A constituent wrote last week: 'All we need now is a statue of you on Knutsford Heath, unveiled by that Mr and Mrs Hamilton.

'I'm sure they could spare the time.'

And another sent a retirement card with the inscription: 'It's such a shame you're leaving. You were so close to getting the hang of the job!'

FOR the people of Knutsford the opening of the second runway has brought Manchester Airport's flightpath so much closer that it is like having an aerial motorway skimming their rooftops.

The sudden increase in noise and nuisance is also a posthumous vindication of the late and much lamented Derek Squirrell.

Derek was a distinguished public servant, a Tory of the best sort, and chairman of the Knutsford and Mobberley Joint Action Group which campaigned tirelessly against the airport's imperial ambitions.

He had no difficulty in mobilising Mobberley, since the second runway lay destructively across 600 of its green acres.

He tried to warn the people of Knutsford that when the thing became a reality they would be penalised just as much.

A few paid heed to him, but to many it was a threat beyond their lives' horizon, and they were not as much concerned as they might have been.

Now they are, and it is too late.

The second runway is no longer a threat but a fact.

There is not so much that we can do about it but to learn to live with it; to hold the airport company to its obligations and to insist that our part of Cheshire, which pays the price of this extravagant public convenience, should also share proportionately in its benefits - whatever they may be.

But good things can happen too and as one nuisance increased, another diminishes.

I hope that those residents of Knutsford and Mobberley, whose houses used to shake to their foundations in the early morning, are less troubled than they used to be by the noise and vibration of railway wagons carrying limestone from the Peak District to the Brumner Mond plants near Northwich.

The number of trains has gone down from 17 a week to 10.

And the limestone is now being carried in quieter wagons, 27 high capacity rail hoppers with an advanced swing suspension system.

I believe in giving credit where credit is due.

Both Brumner Mond and EWS, the carrier, deserve their share of it for heeding the complaints and running their businesses in a neighbour-friendly way.

And I hope I'll not be thought of as a Labour stooge if I thank the Government too for the DETR grant of more than £6 million that made it possible.

I AM hardly at the cutting edge of modern technology.

My first book was written on a typewriter with a broken carriage return.

And to this day I am one of the few MPs without a website.

But what I would not do for myself, my supporters in Brentwood and Ongar have done for me. Last week the Friends of Bell launched their own website. It will equip me, should I decide to accept the challenge, to fight a state-of-the-art campaign in the Essex constituency - and to reach out to the young, who understand these things so much better than I do. I wonder what my father would have thought. He was even more of a technophobe than I am. He farmed with horses and wrote with a quill pen.

And when he had done with his horses he would pick up his pen, and warn of the dangers of an industrialised agriculture.