DANNY MORRISON once remarked to me, at a particularly low point in the political fortunes of Sinn Fein: "Fortunately, whenever we're in real trouble we can always depend on the Brits to do something stupid".
Mr Morrison has made a career change since then. Mercier Press has just published The Wrong Man, his bleak, densely plotted novel about an IRA informer. But the British don't change, not when it comes to making the kind of mistake he was describing.
There have been times in recent weeks when the cynical observer might have been forgiven for wondering whether Sir Patrick Mayhew and his junior ministers have devised a new Machiavellian strategy to ensure that Sinn Fein gets as high a vote as possible in the forthcoming British general election.
A recent issue of the Irish News made the point well. There were three stories on the front page. The first predicted the early release by the Northern Secretary of two Scottish soldiers convicted in 1994 of having murdered a Catholic teenager in Belfast. Peter McBride was shot in the back as he was running away from an army patrol. At 18, he was the father of two children. Nobody who knew's him or the area in which he lived believes he had any connection with the IRA. The case has already been compared to that of Private Lee Clegg, whose release sparked off serious riots.
The second story was a report about Roisin McAliskey. After enormous pressure, the British have made some concessions concerning the conditions in which she is held. But the key question of whether she will be allowed to keep her baby has yet to be resolved and there seems to be no understanding of how offensive it is to many people, by no means all of them republican sympathisers, to suggest that she is not a fit mother.
The question that springs to mind is how have things have been allowed to go this far, when a reasonable accommodation could have been reached with a modicum of good will?
In political terms, though, it is the third headline - "Denton scandal threatens jobs" - which is likely to have the most powerful impact in alienating middle class nationalists, those who normally vote for the SDLP but who can shift to Sinn Fein when they want to send a traditional two fingered message to the British government.
The goings on in Baroness Denton's private office, the way the minister managed - or failed to manage - the deployment of her staff, is a storm cloud that has been rumbling for some time. It might have been possible to defuse its explosive potential when the Irish News first broke the story, but Baroness Denton's own reaction - economy with the truth combined with injured defiance - ensured that the political fallout has drifted as far as Washington and will not go away.
THE story has already been reported in this paper so I will recap only briefly. Baroness Denton holds two ministerial portfolios in the NIO - agriculture and economic development. Wearing the second of these hats, she is responsible for monitoring and enforcing fair employment guidelines. The episode which has now led to the setting up of an official inquiry took place in her office at the Department of Agriculture.
A Catholic female secretary, who was transferred to another department at Baroness Denton's request, brought a case for sectarian harassment which had taken place while she was employed in the minister's private office. Her case was supported by the Fair Employment Commission and the Department of Agriculture paid her compensation of £10,000.
It has been the below stairs glimpses of what went on in the minister's office during the Orange marching season of 1995 which really set the cat among the pigeons.
It appears that Baroness Denton's private secretary, a Protestant woman, watched events at Drumcree on television in the minister's office and reported on what was happening to her colleagues. An internal official report said that she "took considerable pleasure in announcing the outcome", i.e. that the Orange Order would proceed through a nationalist area.
Her Catholic colleagues did not entirely share her satisfaction. As one SDLP member put it: "It beggars belief that a senior member of staff would be watching the minister's television set and crowing about Trimble and Paisley prancing in, triumph down the Garvaghy Road."
The subsequent transfer of a Catholic employee who had been at the receiving end of this treatment while the Protestant member of staff was retained, the breaching of the government's own fair employment guidelines, Baroness Denton's attempts to justify her decision on the grounds of "efficiency" and, not least, her quoting Martin, Luther King in a way which seemed to compare her position in Northern Ireland to that of the martyred civil rights leader - all combined to make a story calculated to enrage nationalists.
FOR these past 25 years, successive British governments have laboured to persuade Catholics that discrimination in employment will not be tolerated. Whole forests have been cut down to provide paper for official documents on the issue. Legislation has been passed. Tough sanctions have been imposed on private companies.
Problems like the flying of the Union Jack or the playing of provocative tunes in the workplace have been taken seriously. Now, here is a British minister with responsibility for a sizeable department, who appears not to understand why these issues are crucial to the perception of good government.
Like most people who have met Baroness Denton, I found her a pleasant, hard working, rather jolly person. She is clearly committed to winning investment for Northern Ireland and to arguing the case of its farmers. But she is also responsible for one of the most sensitive issues in Northern Ireland politics - to ensure there will be zero tolerance of discrimination in employment.
Her failure to grasp the importance of this has not only damaged the credibility of government policy it has undermined the work of many years by bodies like the Fair Employment Commission.
There have been demands for her resignation. If she were to go now, I believe she would be remembered with affection and respect as a British minister who was brave enough to admit that she had made a damaging mistake and to accept responsibility for it. I don't believe for a moment that this will happen.
Even if she were prepared to resign, it is too close to an election for John Major to accept the loss of even a junior minister. The alternative is that Baroness Denton will stay on for the last few weeks of this government. In that case, she will be remembered as the minister who showed us that the British government's commitment to fair employment and parity of esteem isn't worth the paper it's written on.
The lesson won't be forgotten.