Prescott's in a race against time and toffs

IF YOU were to believe all you read in the newspapers - never a good idea, if you ask me - this isn't a great time to be working on these pages. But, actually, it has been a rather good week.

It's not just that reports of our demise, like Mark Twain's, are exaggerated. The best part is the support coming from all sides (except, of course, Wapping and Downing Street) over Rupert Murdoch's business ethics.

This hit me at the Mayfair Theatre on Thursday evening, just a few days after the House of Lords had voted to outlaw his price-cutting tactics. The opening speaker at the British Environment and Media Awards said something nice about the Independent and the Independent on Sunday and then turned to the Government minister present, Michael Meacher, and begged him to persuade his colleagues to do something about the unfair competition.

It was phrased mildly enough, with no reference to Mr Murdoch, but a Times man in the audience started shouting: "Shame on you! Shame on you!" (I've heard of "the Thunderer", but surely "the Heckler" is a bit much. ) His clamour was drowned out by applause from the rest of the packed theatre. It added a lot to the gaiety of the evening.

Mr Meacher's speech then made a particular point of the "right to roam", another area where Mr Blair and his coterie seem to have got isolated from the rest of the Labour Party and from most of the country. He promised that the Government's proposals would be published "shortly" - good news, since the Prime Minister has been sitting on them for months.

"Shortly" may be too cautious, because, in fact, John Prescott's Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) - whose normal speeds in such things are slow, slower and glacial - is working at break-neck speed to get the plans out before the beginning of next month.

Why then? Well, that is when the next countryside rally is to exercise its right to roam through London's streets, frightening the traffic. Last year's influx so scared the chums in No 10 that they turned against banning hunting (rightly in my view, but that's beside the point) and there's serious concern that this one might persuade the Prime Minister to block the access plans again.

Puzzlingly the Country Landowners' Association (CLA) - a body so far in the past that even Mrs Thatcher had little time for it - seems to have persuaded Tony Blair that it truly represents the millions of British country dwellers instead of just a minority whose paucity in numbers is matched only by the extent of its privilege.

Now the CLA has a wheeze to get the DETR's job of protecting the countryside (including overseeing the right to roam) transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture, which has spent the last four decades doling out subsidies to farmers to destroy it. And why on earth not?

Having made such a hash of food safety that the area is being taken away and put in a separate agency, isn't it only fair for the ministry to be given the chance to finish its work on the countryside?

o TALKING of the Countryside Rally reminds me of another nice thing that happened this week, the finding by Sir Gordon Downey, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and the Commons Standards and Privilege Committee, that Lord Steel had broken parliamentary rules over his pounds 93,752 job as chairman of the Countryside Movement.

No, I'm not being nasty to Lord Steel, honest. It's just that when I wrote of his salary back in September he said my report was "defamatory", talked of lawyers and described it as a "tendentious piece of journalism". But now, it appears from Sir Gordon's investigation, the story could have been much tougher.

o MEANWHILE in another part of the House, junior Treasury minister Dawn Primarolo dutifully turned up to give evidence to the Commons Environmental Audit Committee. You may remember how I was going on a couple of weeks ago about her refusal to appear before the new committee (which John Prescott calls "a terrier to snap at the Government's heels") even though it has "the power to question any Government minister".

Anyway she tipped up on Tuesday, as anxious to please as a puppy, even taking the unusual step of asking the committee to visit the Treasury to talk over policy development with officials. She was at pains to point out that her change of heart had nothing to do with anything that had appeared in the press. That's good to know.