Tony Blair will try to warn, yet not threaten, all sides in the peace process tomorrow, believes Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor
The Westminster term drags well on into the summer, by which time MPs and others are weary and ready for a break.
With Northern Ireland again in crisis, and the Prime Minister and Northern Secretary trying to square another circle in the peace process, there will be good reason for a stronger feeling of fatigue than normal. This time there's a sharper sense of panic, with minds being already focused on May's Assembly elections.
What is also alarming is the severity with which the parties blame each other for the problem.
Mr Gerry Adams believes that the prospect of elections is filling Ulster Unionists with dread on two counts: having to promote an unpopular peace process with an increasingly hostile electorate, and fighting off stiff challenges from the Rev Ian Paisley's DUP.
The party president, in a long and detailed analysis of the unionist position last week, accused Mr Trimble's party of everything from begrudgery and infighting, to making insatiable demands and failure of leadership.
All unionists point the finger of blame at Sinn Féin and claim that its members are trying to have it both ways - playing politics and clinging to paramilitarism.
The British government, keen to protect Mr Trimble to whom it owes so much, privately admits that snowballs are being thrown by those within its own establishment who are opposed to the peace process, but that the IRA, by dint of Colombia and Castlereagh to name but two incidents, is continually providing the snow.
The Irish Government, as shown by the Taoiseach's statement last week urging a stiffening of resolve to see the thing through, hopes that Downing Street will see current difficulties as just that - difficulties. Not the end.
The road to the promised land is via supporting the accord and the institutions it set up, rather than giving in to demands for sanctions and expulsions. This is a time for keeping people in, not throwing them out, and supporting institutions, not collapsing them.
The SDLP also faces problems. Overtaken in the polls last year by Sinn Féin, it contemplates the possibility that should the process limp on until May, the main contender for the First Minister's job could be a DUP man, while a "Shinner" could have first refusal of Mr Mark Durkan's job.
The missing ingredient, as Dr John Reid, reminds us, is confidence. The unionists need confidence in Sinn Féin claims that its dedication to peace is for real.
Mr Tony Blair said as recently as last week he believes Sinn Féin, so that tends to put expulsion of Mr Martin McGuinness and Ms Bairbre de Brún from the Executive on very long odds indeed.
But such statements from Downing Street won't stem draining unionist confidence in Mr Adams or the Belfast Agreement.
Sinn Féin doubts claims by others that its significant mandate at the polls is being treated on a par with that of others. It suspects unionist insistence that the days of second-class status are over.
IRA apologies about wrongs done to non-combatants only stoke up hostile questions about the deaths of combatants rather than soothe jangled unionist nerves. It's as if they would rather believe Mr McGuinness's opinions 30 years ago before they'll heed his protestations about a commitment to peace today.
All of which leaves Mr Blair with the trickiest of manoeuvres when he takes to the despatch box in the Commons tomorrow. If he responds to an Ulster Unionist question on the current situation, Mr Blair will have to find some way of issuing the yellow card, spoken of quietly by government officials last week. Yet he will have to compose his lines so that they sound positive rather than hostile and threatening. The trouble with the yellow card is that the red one is the next to play and Mr Blair won't want to do that.
He warned in a speech in Belfast many crises ago that the test for the paramilitaries will get more rigorous as time goes on. How he manages to say to them tomorrow that enough is enough without making it sound like a gauntlet is being thrown down remains to be seen.