It is being called the phoney election - the undeclared yet blatant campaigning leading up to the expected polling day of May 5.

But the putative general election is phoney for another reason besides the fact that it hasn't been called. Officially its purpose is to elect our MPs. In realty it verges strongly on a Presidential election.

Ever since Margaret Thatcher's time as "Prime Minister", the presidential element in our so-called Parliamentary democracy has been growing stronger. The other day Tony Blair, responding to claims by Tory leader Michael Howard that the NHS was better under the Tories, declared: "If people believe that, they can vote for him rather than me."

But only, of course, if we all shift pretty smartly to Mr Howard's Folkestone constituency. Meanwhile, Mr Howard has encouraged the presidential trend by sharing his electioneering platform (assuming that is what it is) with his family. And before any of us criticises this political first, we ought to ask whether we have ever said, of Mr Howard or any other leader: "I couldn't vote for him".

In office these days, our Prime Minster does indeed act very much like a President. Our democracy has become a strange hybrid of the Parliamentary and the Presidential. Have we struck upon not only a new but an improved form of democracy? Or are there dangers in ever more power residing in the hands of one person elected by only a few thousand voters?

More immediately, let us turn to Alan Milburn. The mastermind of New Labour's election campaign (a limp-looking specimen), the Darlington MP says: "I have never taken the view that the Conservative Party is dead."

How could he since he was prominent in the political heist known as The Project, by which Labour stole the Tory party's clothes and has ever since paraded in them as New Labour? Naturally miffed by the theft at the time, the Tories have no need to feel dismayed, since their party lives on. But Labour supporters, whose party genuinely is dead, should be (and many are) in despair.

Out walking last weekend, in Fryup Head in the North York Moors, I came upon a touching victim of the hard weather - a wren, frozen to death in a snowdrift.

I took it home and buried it in our garden. Happier sights on the same outing were of a curlew, newly arrived back on the moors, and the largest hare I have ever seen. I was cheered by the thought that this fine hare, and all its Fryup fellows, were now safe from the Stokesley Farmers' Beagles.

Alas, however, the weekend brought a truly dreadful tragedy - the drowning of a mother and two children at Scarborough. About a year ago, on a visit to Whitby I saw three kids dodging quite high waves surging up the slipway by the West Pier. I left the crowd watching the spectacle to warn the woman in charge of the kids that what they were doing was very dangerous, not least because there was a large log in the water, which would present an extra hazard if anything went wrong. I told her how two lads had died after being washed off the slipway at Sandsend. She said: "OK" - and let the kids carry on.