SOMETIMES you can only marvel at this Government's ingenuity. From out of nowhere, it has managed to rustle up a fig-leaf to hide its embarrassment.

Its polling suggested it was going to get beaten in regional assembly referendums in the North West and Yorkshire and the Humber, and so it shamelessly scrapped those referendums.

It is rather like a footballer storming home in a huff with his ball under his arm because he wasn't going to win the game.

But instead of openly admitting this, the Government chose to hide behind its concerns about postal balloting. Whatever the Electoral Commission says about the operation of June's postal experiments, it conclusions will refer to all regions. To single out the North-East, then, looks rather odd.

Anyway, there's no use crying over postponed referendums. The North-East goes ahead alone.

While the no campaigners will rightfully be gleeful about yesterday's embarrassment, there are straws for the yes camp to clutch at.

Firstly, the Government is taking a huge gamble it must be pretty confident that it can win. It won't want two doses of embarrassment - one now and one on November 4. If it thought that a November nightmare was likely in the North-East, it would surely have used its postal ballot fig-leaf to scrap all three referendums yesterday.

Secondly, yesterday's back-track keeps regionalism alive. Had there been three referendums and had only the North-East said yes, there is no way regional assemblies could have been rolled out across the rest of the country. The idea would have died, and this region would have been left with a constitutional quirk - rather like the directly-elected mayors of Middlesbrough and Hartlepool.

This way, should Labour recover from Iraq and recover its popularity, and should a North-East assembly prove a success, it is still possible that the North West and Yorkshire could have their own assemblies by the end of the decade.

Before that, though, there is a referendum to be won. We have the date; after yesterday's draft Bill we even have the powers. Now we need to work out just how all of this is going to affect - either positively or negatively - our everyday lives.

Let the campaigning commence.