Election diary: Only his party is entitled to carry the centrist flame, David Ford tells Dan Keenan.
Alliance represents the only true centrists in this election, and its candidates are neither defeatist nor spoilers for other pro-Agreement parties, claims its leader.
David Ford swats aside criticism from others about the role his party plays. The first-past-the-post system militates against small parties, but he will not stand aside for any one.
Alliance famously withdrew from the North Down campaign in the 2001 Westminster campaign to facilitate the victory of pro-agreement Lady Sylvia Hermon of the UUP over UK Unionist leader Bob McCartney, and in two other areas.
Alliance also "redesignated" for 22 minutes in the Assembly to aid the election of David Trimble and Mark Durkan as first and deputy first ministers.
But there will be no more political largesse, Ford says. "The people that [ these actions] gave power to in 2001, both in terms of our tactics in the general election and over the way we played around with the voting rules in the Assembly in order to give Trimble and Durkan the opportunity to provide stability in this society, let us down."
Alliance has not spoiled anything, he says. "It is the two parties which failed to use the lead which they were given."
So Alliance is fighting 12 of the 18 seats, supporting the independent Kieran Deeny in West Tyrone, "and saying nothing about the other five".
They are fighting on the centre ground which they, and they alone, occupy. Neither the agreement architects of the SDLP nor the Nobel-winning David Trimble are any longer entitled to portray themselves as anti-sectarian mould-breakers.
The events since Good Friday 1998 prove that only Alliance is entitled to carry that particular flame.
"I do not see that either of those two parties have done anything in the past four years to justify anything that we did for them," Ford says.
"They have made no reciprocal gestures, there was no understanding of our position . . . and there was no real attempt to even work on a policy of a shared future."
That's why Alliance is taking its stance on its territory. "In terms of Westminster we are the centre ground - ourselves alone." He laughs off the "unfortunate term", but sticks to its import.
Stepping up his criticism of the SDLP, he dismisses the pretenders to the moderate crown as "Sinn Féin lite". Returning to the Ulster Unionists, he accuses them of being "even worse than the DUP".
It's a party "desperately running off to the extreme, trying to outflank the DUP".
Alliance politics remains about overcoming divisions, and not merely managing them as some of the other parties advocate, he believes.
"Power is given to the largest group of unionists at the expense of all other unionists, and the same with nationalists.
"That might have worked if the SDLP and Ulster Unionists had shown that they were prepared to move away from that kind of politics."
History will record, he believes, that the agreement is not as great a document as many believe it to be and that those charged with its implementation didn't set about their task with the good will necessary to make things different.
Difficulties such as these are compounded by the tendency of the Blair government to deal with the DUP and Sinn Féin and to call on the other parties only when they are in a spot of difficulty and need to be bailed out.
"As to accepting our analysis, for all the polite words we get from government, they are still concerned with managing a fix rather than making a fundamental change to this society."
For all that, Alliance candidates continue to trudge the streets of constituencies which they will not win, looking for a respectable showing on May 5th - understood to be perhaps 7 or 8 per cent of the share of the overall vote.