During English Tourism Week it was great to visit Stourhead and learn how it and Visit Wiltshire are encouraging people to spend tourist pounds locally.

Last week I visited defence establishments at Faslane, Lossiemouth and Inverness and was bad mouthed by the Scots Nats.

I’m in good company. George Robertson, sometime Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary General, an internationally acknowledged defence expert, was summarily rubbished by the Scots Nats for pointing out that fracturing the Union would have geopolitical consequences well beyond our shores.

The Nationalists and our adversaries abroad may be rubbing their hands over narrowing polling figures and the prospect of the UK’s demise but I’m confident Alex Salmond will be rumbled by the Scottish public well in advance of September’s referendum.

But in the bile and vitriol stakes his party wins, no question.

I’m sorry for Maria Miller who I’ve found decent and hardworking. Innocent too of the central claim investigated by the Standards Commissioner.

However, it was right she should resign since she’s a politician and the politics of this were bad, becoming worse.

The media, of course, was particularly vicious because she presided over press regulation proposals it hates and others had knives out because of her central role in introducing gay marriage. The odds on survival were never good.

We can look at ways of regulating MPs further, although they are rightly now subject to what is surely the most rigorous scrutiny and publicly transparent trawling of their accounts of any occupational group.

Those who transgress, or just make a mistake as we are all at risk of doing since we’re human, are liable to trial by IPSA, trial by media, trial by constituents and to an actual trial like everyone else.

It was a great privilege to sow centenary poppy seed at Trow-bridge station on Friday. Buy some from B&Q in aid of The Royal British Legion and get sowing.