IT IS TIME to apologise. The Government has been proved triumphantly right; its critics, including me, humiliatingly wrong. It is now clear that the Bill to ban hunting was not only new Labour’s most successful piece of domestic legislation. It is one of the best Acts of Parliament promoted by any postwar government.

Consider the position of hunting ten years ago. There were problems. Deterred both by the expense and the time involved, not enough youngsters were joining hunts. Some farmers were becoming troublesome about hunts riding across their land, especially if there was a daft wife in the offing who had been listening to one of Paul McCartney’s females.

The hunting community also knew that it was disapproved of by the urban masses, who had even infected the National Trust. The NT had banned hunting on land in Devon, which had been left to it on the understanding that hunting would always be preserved. The threat of a ban made it difficult to recruit young hunt workers. Why take up a career that might not survive?

So hunting morale had suffered — until Tony Blair rode to the rescue. It is true that ostensibly the Government brought forward a Bill to prohibit hunting. But any Labour backbencher who was deceived by this must have been as dim as John Prescott.

The real purposes were transparently obvious. The Blair Bill demonstrated that it would be impossible to ban hunting. Moreover, by turning hunting into a question of civil liberty, it enabled the hunts to win back public support. Hunting is more popular than it has been since polling began. There are even reports that the National Trust will start to live up to its name, and lift the ban.

In the shires, meanwhile, consciences have been pricked. People have realised that they must use their hunts or risk losing them. Last season more people hunted than for many years and more foxes were killed. The number of youngsters riding out delighted everyone involved with the sport.

There has been a deplorable tendency for those involved in hunting to insult the Prime Minister. T-shirts have been produced with the slogan “Bollocks to Blair”. This is a shockingly ungrateful way to treat a benefactor. In future, I hope that the first stirrup cup at every meet will be drunk to the refrain of “D’ye ken Tony Blair, with his coat so pink”.