This diary has been watching the political debacle over the London mayor with some attention (intrigued as we are by devolution in all its ramifications). One question jumps out: just how did Tony Blair et al get themselves in such a fankle over what is a very modest constitutional change?

Steve Richards, the political editor of this journal, suggests that the current mess is down to Blair's reluctance to grasp the nettle represented by Ken Livingstone. He writes of Blair's daily meetings: "For more than a year, one or two of the braver participants raised the Ken problem. Blair would not address it. 'Let's leave London' was always his dismissive response." The results of his issue-ducking are now plain to see.

This rather smacks of the way that another turn-of-the-century king, William III, approached the problem of the Scottish Highlands. According to the acute observer of late 17th-century events Bishop Gilbert Burnet, the massacre at Glencoe in 1689 was not government strategy, but a blunder. And it was due to King William's tendency to shy at making decisions and get behind with his paperwork. Burnet claims that when the king signed the document that turned the Duke of Argyll's militia loose on the MacIans, it was done "without any inquiry about it; for he was too apt to sign papers in a hurry, without examining the importance of them. This was one effect of his slowness in despatching business."

The result was a calamity; 36 (more or less) innocent clansfolk died and the king's enemies were handed a propaganda bonanza. "This raised a mighty outcry," writes Burnet, "and was published by the French in their gazettes, and by the Jacobites in their libels, to cast a reproach on the King's government as cruel and barbarous." Worse, the killings at Glencoe also alienated many of the Gaelic clans and created the bitterness and resentment in which armed rebellion flourished. Hence the Jacobite insurgencies of 1690, 1709, 1715, 1719 and 1745 - some of which rattled the roof timbers of the British state. Echoes of them still sound.

Now, this diary is not seriously comparing the dismal events at Glencoe with the squabble between the Labour Party and Livingstone. But Blair's dithering has certainly "cast a reproach" on his government and created serious resentment among the socialist clans of London and the South-east. Whether that will ever flare into open, Jacobite-style rebellion remains to be seen.

Another constitutional conundrum: if town planning is the province of the Scottish Parliament, why has a parliamentary committee that is chaired by a Westminster MP been assembled to ruminate on Railtrack's expansion plans for Waverley Station in Edinburgh? And why will a final decision on the ambitious project come from the Secretary of State John Reid, rather than the First Minister, Donald Dewar? The answer seems to be that, since it was Westminster that laid down the rules by which the station was built in the first place, only Westminster can change the rules now. But given that just about every law passed since 1707 is a Westminster law, does that mean that none can be changed without Westminster's approval? And if that is the case, what is the point of the Holyrood parliament? It is all very puzzling.