Has Tony Blair lost the plot, or simply rewritten the rules of engagement for the peace process? asks Frank Millar
Will the Irish bit of his intended "legacy" be defined more in terms of a bilateral deal between the British government and the IRA than by multiparty agreement bequeathing a settled and secure Northern Ireland?
And might recovery of belief in the primacy of political process, and genuine accommodation, consequently have to await the arrival of a new British prime minister?
To pose such questions is to reflect the marked loss of belief in Mr Blair himself among people who bought his promise to deliver the Belfast Agreement on a fair, equitable and constitutional basis almost eight years ago.
Blairite loyalists are disdainful of the notion that the prime minister's presumed successor, Gordon Brown, would ever be a friend to Northern Ireland. At best, they say, the dour Scot would have no interest in this peculiar province of the United Kingdom which elects not a single Labour MP.
At worst, it is whispered, the "Iron Chancellor" might be actively hostile to the scale of the British subvention and indisposed to indulge what many Labourites consider Northern Ireland's hopelessly sectarian and self-obsessed political class.
Time may well prove them right. Yet informed observers in the North see in this "better hold on to nurse" defence of Blair, further evidence of No 10's disjunction from the current state of opinion in the "two-party state" of Northern Ireland which British-Irish policy has delivered.
And while they won't like it, the reality for No 10 is that the parties in Northern Ireland are inclining increasingly to the idea that recovery is beyond Blair, and that around Brown is where the action will eventually be.
"It is not our happy view, but it is our fear that it is so," says a senior member of the SDLP, who confirms: "It is certainly Mark's view that Brown would make a better fist of it."
SDLP leader Mark Durkan has so far stopped short of calling on Blair to stand aside in favour of Brown. But he is bursting with evident frustration at what he has described as No 10's "feckless and reckless" handling of current issues in Northern Ireland.
Consider the words; consider the source. This is John Hume's successor as leader of "constitutional nationalism" in the North.
Durkan describes the Blair government's controversial OTR proposals to deal with fugitive terrorist suspects and others guilty of offences before the Belfast Agreement as the worst piece of Irish legislation ever presented to the British parliament.
His party thinks current British plans to finance community-based "restorative justice" schemes a licence for legalised vigilantism which, in the words of one of his colleagues, "will see the killers of Robert McCartney and their like policing the streets of our communities."
And in common with most others, Hume's successors see in London's adoption of Sinn Féin's preferred model for local government reform in the North as a possible instrument of re-partition or "Balkanisation".
Even if all things were deemed equal - and the current DUP-SDLP consensus is that they are not - it would be surprising if the Rev Ian Paisley's DUP was not surveying a changing Westminster scene and choosing, in Ian Paisley jnr's words, to "play the marathon rather than the sprint." Indeed, we are into the familiar territory of onetime Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux as the majority DUP savours the possibility of a "hung parliament", if not a change of government, at the next election.
Mr Blair has said he is going and Brown (if it is he) will have to pitch himself for the votes of 'Middle England' against a Tory party seemingly rejuvenated under David Cameron. The immediate Cameron effect has left Blair warning Labour not to concede the centre ground of British politics, and the Liberal Democrats, increasingly disposed to replace Charles Kennedy, unsure whether to turn left or right.
This is potentially fertile territory for a DUP currently the fourth party in the House of Commons, with nine MPs and the prospect of more in four years.
"I think distrust of Blair is a healthy attribute right across our party," says Paisley jnr, confirming his view that the party might want to play it long. "If we can create an enabling environment in which there is sufficient unionist confidence, we'll talk to the [ British] government about the process over the next two or three years, or more."
How much Paisley jnr matters is a question which exercises the best official minds in London and Dublin. Their most benign view is that his influence will not survive his father's domination (surely bound to end some time?).
From within the DUP it is suggested the so-called "modernisers" might even prevent jnr succeeding in his father's North Antrim seat when the time comes. For the present, however, he plainly speaks for and to what remains indisputably a Paisley party.
Moreover, the "modernisers" who actually matter do not dissent from his view that there is currently no appetite for a resumption of power sharing.
The rationale for Blair's (and chief of staff Jonathan Powell's) current pursuit of policies favoured by Sinn Féin alone is that it helps clear the way for a more emollient future DUP leadership to make peace with republicans. Yet - for all the DUP's manifest failure to stop the "concession-making to Sinn Féin" - informed opinion on the ground suggests unionists will permit the DUP its own "comfort zone" for precisely as long as it declines a deal with Sinn Féin.
In what the SDLP's Alex Atwood shrewdly identifies as a direct challenge to the British, US special envoy Mitchel Reiss has again offered Mr Blair a possible starting point for breaking the impasse by reasserting the American view that Sinn Féin must be required to endorse policing in Northern Ireland as a prerequisite to entering government.