Good PR job will do the business for Alderdice

It was the final dress rehearsal for the great Alliance puppet show. Lord Alderdice sat with his right hand inserted in a unionist Punch and his left hand in a nationalist Judy; and, in a cheering vision of the new North, the puppets just sat there and grinned.

They don't have any lines in the Alliance production, which is a bit unrealistic, even for a puppet show. But, if the numbers fall right tomorrow, Lord Alderdice and his party could be digitally manipulating the two traditions of Northern politics for some time to come. With a predicted seven seats or more, Alliance may hold the balance of power in the new Assembly, a position it has enjoyed for the past year in another forum.

"Look what's happened at Belfast City Hall", said Lord Alderdice-the-puppet-master. Admittedly, his avowed aim of "an end to Punch and Judy politics" hasn't quite happened there yet, but after years in which the Punch and Judy traditions performed their time-honoured antics daily for an amused international audience, things have certainly changed.

Since May 1997, the once-warring partners have been responding to counselling. The first nationalist mayor of Belfast has been succeeded in the job by Lord Alderdice's own brother and, while the party leader admitted this was "power-broking" rather than the power-sharing he sought, he declared: "Things are actually better."

The crunch question for Alliance is whether it will declare itself part of the unionist bloc in the Assembly, if this is necessary to ensure the required majority of both traditions on key decisions.

By the time the issue was raised at yesterday's press conference, Lord Alderdice had laid the puppets aside and put on his doctor's mask instead. "I'm a doctor," he reminded us, "and a doctor will do anything he can to make a patient better. But he's not going to do something that would poison the patient."

The meaning of this wasn't exactly clear, so Dr Alderdice was pressed for a second opinion. When this didn't provide a definitive answer either, the matter was dropped by journalists who, after referendum and election campaigns in quick succession, are probably a little punch-drunk themselves.