The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, has not finally determined whether elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly will take place as scheduled on May 1st.
This is being made clear in Whitehall despite building British confidence that the Sinn Féin leadership is about to deliver significant IRA moves toward ending the full range of its paramilitary activities.
While still insisting they do not know the terms or scale of any republican move, British ministers and officials now appear convinced that the Sinn Féin president, Mr Gerry Adams, is committed to delivering "something big" in the context of the ongoing negotiations about republican and British "acts of completion" designed to secure the future of the Belfast Agreement.
Mr Blair is said to be "determined to prove the pessimists wrong" and to secure a comprehensive deal which would enable the Ulster Unionists to return to the suspended Executive. In that context, Downing Street sources continue to side-step questions about whether the election is in any event guaranteed, simply expressing the hope that prior agreement on a return to devolution will render the question irrelevant.
Well-placed sources have again confirmed the strong disposition, in Number 10 and in the Northern Ireland Office, that the elections should go ahead as planned. That disposition is further strengthened by a growing belief in Whitehall that the government can keep the political process on track through and beyond Assembly elections, even if the outcome of the present negotiation does not enable or persuade Mr David Trimble to commit the Ulster Unionists to resume power-sharing.
The legislative provision for a comprehensive review of the implementation of the Belfast Agreement, scheduled for September, is already looming large in calculations as to how the process can be managed, even if the election outcome on the unionist side delays the elections of First and Deputy First Ministers and the appointment of a new Executive.
However, The Irish Times has been told that, barring a prior agreement which includes Mr Trimble, a final decision by Mr Blair to risk everything on the election will turn on the detail of any IRA move. In New York this week, Mr Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin echoed the private insistence of other Sinn Féin leaders over recent weeks that there is no question of the IRA disbanding, standing-down, "or otherwise declaring themselves out of business", as one source put it.
While the British government appears to accept this reality - spelt out by the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in his briefing to British journalists in London before Christmas - the bottom-line in London appears to require the IRA to re-define the terms of its cessation of military operations to embrace all the requirements listed by Mr Blair during the 1998 referendum and again in his "acts of completion" speech in Belfast last October. This would suggest an IRA commitment to end targeting and surveillance, as well as so-called "punishment" attacks, weapons procurement and recruitment.
Despite Sinn Féin's insistence that any IRA move will be conditional on definitive British plans across the range of issues from demilitarisation, through the equality and human rights agenda, to further policing reforms, it is accepted in Whitehall that Mr Blair could come under strong pressure from Mr Trimble and others to postpone the elections if the IRA move proved negligible.
It also seems clear now that, because of the limited time available, the British government does not actually foresee all "acts of completion" done and dusted ahead of a decision to call the election, but rather agreement on acts to be carried out by both sides before, during and beyond an election campaign.