What would Tony Blair's departure mean to the Northern Ireland peace process, asks Frank Millar
Does Tony Blair really offer the last chance (at least for more years than we dare risk) of a political settlement in Northern Ireland? Or - whisper it gently - might the departing British prime minister actually now pose an obstacle to the DUP/Sinn Féin deal he and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern insist must be in place by their November 24th deadline?
The dreary steeples have witnessed a number of significant departures since the peace process took root. When "pan-nationalism" was at its height, the loss of US President Bill Clinton (not to mention the arrival of President Bush) might have seemed more than the process could bear.
'Yet it proved otherwise.
With equal regret and realism, Sinn Féin had likewise to rationalise the fall of the once-pivotal Albert Reynolds. Many informed outsiders greeted the end of John Hume's career, the eclipse of the SDLP and Sinn Féin's ascendancy in the North, as a necessary sacrifice for the greater cause of peace.
The suspicion remains widespread, meanwhile, that the republican movement deliberately engineered the political death of David Trimble and the collapse of the Ulster Unionist Party. Similarly, pragmatic officials in London and Dublin greeted the emergence of the DUP as majority unionist party as a predictable (indeed probably inevitable) step toward securing an agreement that would finally stick.
And while Blair and Ahern pray the Rev Ian Paisley really does want to play out his final days as First Minister, realists in both systems (as well as in Sinn Féin) allow privately they may actually have to wait for Peter Robinson.
In other words, it is never quite the end of history. And in fairness Northern Secretary Peter Hain stopped short of making that claim in Dundalk last week.
However, he is adamant that history will certainly be put on hold if Paisley and the DUP do not deliver this autumn - "because the world will move on". Blair's official spokesman echoes the same message - implicitly warning the DUP against "waiting for Gordo" - insisting next month's talks in Scotland represent "a unique window of opportunity". And just in case anyone still has not got the point, Northern Ireland Office Minister David Hanson suggests the consequences of not taking it could be "dire".
Hanson's warning is as over-the-top and counter-productive as Dermot Ahern's assertion that refusal to share power now will see Northern Ireland's politicians reduced to a world of "virtual" politics.
That said, Ahern and Hain are clearly right to question whether any other two leaders would bring the personal commitment with which the Taoiseach and British prime minister have sustained this process.
Respected insiders say Bertie Ahern is a brilliant negotiator who never leaves a meeting without preserving, if not enhancing, the process, even in times of difficulty.
And while many mocked, nationalist Ireland in particular had cause to celebrate Blair's determined relationship with "the hand of history".
Certainly nobody in Dublin expected such a consistent hands-on approach from Blair, even as they eagerly awaited the ejection of the Major government and his arrival in Downing Street in 1997.
Despite his own high hopes of serving as deputy Labour leader in a Gordon Brown administration, however, Hain makes plain we cannot expect the same order of priorities as a new regime seeks to renew itself in office ahead of the next British general election.
Nor should we conclude this for reasons to be deduced from the virulent attacks seeking to make Brown's character an issue in the upcoming leadership contest.Indeed some might think the chancellor's alleged failings - as a socially dysfunctional, uncollegiate control freak, easily bored, unwilling to schmooze and intolerant of people who disagree with him - might make him rather at home among politicians on all sides in the North.
Three rather more serious points are made by people with an inside track in Whitehall. First that, despite his determination to extend his treasury control over almost every government department, Brown has shown little interest in Northern Ireland.
Second, that Hain's view probably approximates with Brown's own, that the North's political class ("really, for the most part, at lower council level," as one source puts it) is pampered and over-indulged.
And third, that the cautious Brown believes Blair has invested too much in the North for too little return, and to the neglect of Labour's real "domestic" priorities.
DUP chief whip Nigel Dodds is one of many who dismisses the anti-Brown line and thinks it "more driven by the need to get some kind of legacy for Tony than anything else".
Once installed in Number 10, Dodds predicts, "Brown will be interested in all the things a prime minister has to be interested in".
Even if the interest is of a different order, many others think it would be no bad thing for a new prime minister to revert to traditional mode and let his Secretary of State carry the burden.
Indeed some senior NIO officials think Brown's chief critic, Charles Clarke, would be ideal for the role. While acknowledging that the same personal commitment will probably not be there - and officially observing the "absolute" nature of the November 24th deadline - official sources with long experience also privately admit "it's probably not needed".
And this, they say, is because "everybody knows where agreement lies" and because the political reality - that the process is only driven by a successful Anglo-Irish partnership - "has been internalised on both sides all the way back to Sunningdale".
To which might be added the further thought that if there is no agreement in November, any resultant interregnum can hardly be blamed on Brown as prime minister (if indeed he does succeed), since it is the outcome preordained by Blair and the Taoiseach.
What neither of them yet knows is whether the DUP will gamble on delay. Key Blair aides say that would be "at the very least a risky bet". And the Robinson wing of the DUP sees little virtue in delay for its own sake since, as one "moderniser" puts it, "the deal will be the same whether it's Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron".
Others close to Dr Paisley, however, take the harsher view - shared incidentally at the highest levels of the SDLP - that Brown could hardly do a worse job given what they see as Blair's total inability ever to face-down Sinn Féin.
It seems these conflicting assessments will inform an internal DUP debate as to whether all their terms must be met before a decision to enter government with Sinn Féin, or whether the vexed question of policing might be better pushed into the long grass.
However, the DUP's calculations will be further complicated by the view of some senior figures that - even if the right terms can be had - the passage of time and change of personnel would make it easier for people (that is unionists) to see what emerges as being "different" from the Belfast Agreement.
As one of their number puts it (emphatically off the record): "It really might be better to break with all the paraphernalia, baggage and spin of Blair."
Irish negotiators would find this a highly superficial approach, while Blair's admirers might think it poor reward for his labours.
But in the harsh world of politics the DUP - kept in the cold while Trimble and the UUP prevailed - might figure they owe him nothing.
And if the "anybody but Blair" tendency prevails, then it might be the wrong prime minister travelling to Scotland next month.