It is a prerequisite in our modern age for any ambitious politician to be seen to have a hinterland. The public like to feel they can relate to their masters. Tony Blair goes dewy-eyed talking about his kids. Bertie Ahern follows the Bhoys from Parkhead. David Trimble gave an interview at the weekend extolling the virtues of Elvis Presley and explaining the intricacies of making your own pasta. All three men are safely within the mature consensus as to what is acceptable for grown men to get up to in their spare time.
What then are we to make of Gerry Adams's confession last week that he likes to hug big trees and feel the surge of power from the earth below? Does a self-confessed "rebel" not care about the - admittedly arbitrary - consensus or has the narcissistic Sinn Fein leader lost the plot? Certainly, the keynote address he left the Weston Park talks to deliver in Westminster on Tuesday night was an extremely tendentious account of the peace process.
Few unionists as they chat at the Twelfth field today will recognise the political and security vista depicted by Mr Adams. He contrasts the "continued use of loyalist and British weapons" with "IRA guns that are silent" and IRA cessations "now into their seventh year". The sickening murder of Ciaran Cummings demonstrates the readiness of loyalist paramilitaries to murder innocent Catholics under any flag of convenience.
But the last person killed by the RUC was Patrick Pearse Jordan, an IRA volunteer on active service, back in 1993 while the army in Northern Ireland has shot nobody since 1992. The IRA, by contrast, has killed more than 30 people since August 1994, at least four of them this year alone.
More worryingly, the Sinn Fein president is still in denial about the whole basis of his party's participation in the democratic process. He complains that the decommissioning issue was introduced only after the first IRA cessation and only by the British government. His memory fails him. The day after the Downing Street Declaration Dick Spring told the Dail how a permanent cessation would be determined: "We are talking about the handing up of arms and are insisting that it would not be simply a temporary cessation of violence to see what the political process offers." The next month - and eight months before the first ceasefire - Gerry Adams was complaining bitterly to the Irish News that the British government only wanted to discuss decommissioning.
So it is wrong to say "there would not have been an IRA cessation if this matter had been made a precondition". The IRA are not political virgins. It is a measure of how accommodating all the democratic parties to the process have been that so much has been offered without any actual decommissioning as defined by British and Irish legislation. Now Gerry Adams seeks to have decommissioning "dealt with as an objective of the peace process and not as a precondition to the political process".
This sounds as though everything else - up to and including total demilitarisation of the state's legitimate forces or "the acceptable face of terrorism" as Gerry Adams called them on Tuesday - is a precondition to movement from the IRA. This might be Gerry Adams's dream world but it is not one compatible with either the Good Friday agreement or Article 15 of the Irish Constitution. Moreover, any lingering legitimacy the retention of arms might have had in republican ideology by virtue of the 1918 election result was washed away in the all-Ireland referendum of May 1998.
Worryingly, it has become fashionable to argue that there is a political imperative for the republican movement to start decommissioning its weapons but no such obligation. The Belfast Agreement tells a different story. The participants to the agreement affirmed their "opposition to any use or threat of force by others". The retention of illegal weapons clearly constitutes such a threat. Participants also pledged to "work to ensure the success of each and every one of the arrangements". One of those is "the total disarmament of all paramilitary organisations".
Furthermore, the agreement's reference in the decommissioning section back to the paragraph dealing with the exclusion of parties from ministerial office, established a clear linkage between the two. So, a party has no absolute right to ministerial office irrespective of its willingness and capacity to fulfil its other obligations, particularly when that party has obvious duties to discharge on decommissioning.
None of this bodes well for the peace process in the short term. If, as seems likely, nothing but acrimony comes from Weston Park, history will record it was because of a strategic error by London and Dublin. They have played down the chance of suspension of the institutions and raised instead the spectre of Assembly elections should there be insufficient progress to allow David Trimble to resume his role as First Minister. This has led to bitter exchanges between SDLP participants and most of the other delegations at Weston Park.
As has been proved throughout the process, there is no chance of a deal if a party feels it will be rewarded for being intransigent. Is it any wonder Gerry Adams on Tuesday night ruled out any chance of decommissioning before the August 12th deadline for progress?
king.uu@btinternet.com