One of Tony Blair's most inglorious achievements must be to have squandered the trust of so many who risked so much to make the Belfast Agreement, writes London Editor Frank Millar
The Belfast Agreement was one of the landmark achievements of Tony Blair's first term in office. Its architecture had been reduced to a state of decay and near-collapse by the end of his second.
Can he restore it before standing down at some point during his expected third? It will certainly not be for want of effort on Blair's part. Inside Number 10 we know there is a firm fixation on the prime minister's "legacy".
For all the promise of 1997, Blair will hardly now secure his place in the history books by putting Britain at the "heart of Europe" by taking the UK into the euro. And a French No next month could derail Gordon Brown's hopes of an orderly transition after a successful (still a mighty presumption) British referendum campaign on the EU constitution.
Moreover, quite apart from the fact that the prime minister sees no alternative way forward in Northern Ireland, we know that he also considers the Good Friday accord to be the template for a possible settlement in the Middle East.
Blair sceptics may consider this grandiose on a scale approaching that which heard him tell Jeremy Paxman last week about the process of "tough choices" by which he finally decided to remove Saddam Hussein.
Most people think he committed British troops in support of decisions taken in Washington. This was a perfectly presentable and historically consistent position in itself and Blair can validly ask which alternative British prime minister would have chosen otherwise. However, even supporters of the war recognise that Blair's enduring "trust" problem derives in part at least from his failure to make the case for regime-change and his decision instead to justify the war on the basis of Iraqi stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction which did not exist.
And just as trust is an unquantifiable factor in the British general election, so it also now attends Blair's management of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Indeed, that he should have squandered the trust of so many who risked so much to make the Belfast Agreement must rank as one of his most inglorious achievements.
The indictment laid at Blair's door by Séamus Mallon, the man who led the SDLP's negotiating team in 1998, is as shocking as it is powerful. Mr Blair had indeed produced a "template", he told MPs in his last major contribution in the Commons - a template for the destruction of the centre ground of politics in Northern Ireland.
Mallon's anger was directed at what he identified as a culture of "side deals" by which the British and Irish governments habitually undercut the centre parties with concessions to the hard men, and to the republican movement in particular.
The charge is echoed by Ulster Unionist leader and former first minister David Trimble, who was undone by his inability to hold Blair to his own declared standard for paramilitary "acts of completion".
The subtext of Trimble's struggle now for electoral survival is that the Rev Ian Paisley encountered a similar problem with Blair last autumn, even as the DUP converged on the "fundamentals" of the agreement it had vowed to destroy. The DUP counters that it drove a harder bargain. It can also be said that London, Dublin and Washington did more for Dr Paisley than they ever did for Trimble on this vexed question by backing the demand for photographic evidence of IRA decommissioning.
Nor is there any solace for the UUP in the thought that Paisley and his colleagues got lucky when the IRA refused to oblige. For all their denials, it is indisputably true - and recognised by the Paisley leadership - that the DUP did indeed have a lucky escape.
The dynamics of the North's election campaign might have been very different had the photographs clinched an agreement which would have committed the DUP to sit in government with Sinn Féin and agree the modalities for the devolution of policing by the end of February, only for Paisley's Christmas to have been ruined by the discovery that the IRA had pulled off the Northern Bank robbery.
The UUP can hardly complain. Luck is a crucial element in politics, and Trimble's has already held out for longer than many would have predicted.
Yet the DUP, its "modernising" wing included, will have learnt lessons from this episode, and from the allegations levelled at the republican movement since by the Irish Government in particular. Which is why what the DUP is saying in the election campaign matters a lot more than London may care to acknowledge.
It is true that both unionist parties are presently saying that they cannot envisage the circumstances in which their community would countenance a resumption of power-sharing with Sinn Féin. It is also true that neither party is actually saying "never" - for the very simple reason that they cannot. If, as Blair hopes, the IRA eventually responds to Gerry Adams with a credible commitment to a process of disbandment, the DUP would be expected to resume the play - not least because, like Trimble's UUP before them, they would be faced with the marginalisation of unionism if they refused.
In this context, officials in Number 10, like their opposite numbers in the Department of the Taoiseach, will have analysed DUP deputy leader Peter Robinson's apparent failure last week to restate his earlier explicit assertion to The Irish Times that the question of Sinn Féin's eventual fitness for office would be for the "next generation" to decide.
However, if there is ambiguity here, what is not in doubt is that the DUP, like the UUP, has rejected the D'Hondt formula, which would guarantee Sinn Féin's automatic entry into any future Northern Ireland Executive. The Taoiseach is right to recognise this as blowing a hole in last December's proferred "comprehensive settlement" and a significant change in the DUP's agenda for any future negotiation.
Nor will it likely prove the only one. Although the "D" word has yet to pass the lips of Blair or Ahern, the murder of Robert McCartney has been enough to shift opinion behind the demand for formal IRA disbandment, from which both governments have consistently shied away.
In consequence, unionists also seem certain to seek to reverse the traditional process of front-loading negotiations by way of concessions to republicans - with Mallon leading nationalist suggestions that republicans be required to endorse the North's policing dispensation up-front.
All of this, of course, is to assume that republicans themselves have not moved to a new ideological space since last December's collapse.
Some close observers think the hint that they may have done so can be found in Adams's renewed attacks on Britain's presumption to exercise jurisdiction in the North and his repeated claim that "we do not have democracy" in that part of the island.
This takes us right back to where we began, or thought we began, in 1998. Adams's assertion directly challenges the belief of all other parties that the Belfast Agreement and the dual referendums represented a collective act of self-determination by the peoples of Ireland; enshrined the principle of consent; and established beyond further dispute the legitimacy of the British state in Northern Ireland.
If David Trimble was undone by Tony Blair's failure to hold republicans to the mark, he was also subverted from the outset by republican insistence that the agreement was but a transitional process to take the North into a united Ireland.
To adapt from Blair's famous "acts of completion" speech, the ambiguity which once served the process well has proved in the end to be its enemy.
Whatever way the unionist electorate votes on May 5th, the emerging leadership is unlikely again to take the question of Northern Ireland's constitutional status on trust.