There's a maxim that 'New Labour' is adept at following. If you want to bury a story release it on a Friday evening. Saturday's not a great 'news day'. People lie in, relax. Sport comes into its own. Few politicians are available for interview. Sunday's papers are teed up and ready to go. Unless Iraq invades the US nobody's going to stop the presses. By Saturday evening the story's dead and buried. By Sunday afternoon people are looking for a new story for Monday's headlines.
Last Friday the SDLP announced it had asked for '18 and upwards' police barracks to be closed. They claimed they had made this request the previous Monday. Why did they wait until Friday to tell the world? Perhaps because their policing spokesman was caught napping by the announcement of the recruitment of 1,500 part-timers for the PSNI? As a member of the Policing Board you'd think he would have known of the plan and been aware of how sensitive the information was since the first recruits are to be from staunch loyalist districts.
The truth is that when the 1,500 are all in place, two-thirds of them will be from nationalist areas, and that this is not a new plan but one Patten proposed as a way of having police reflect the community they patrol.
When the SDLP spokesman finally emerged, many found him lame.
Anyway, by that time Gerry Kelly had the ball under his arm and was half way up the pitch shouting that 50-50 recruitment was being undermined.
So perhaps that explains Friday's 'demand' to close police barracks: an attempt to regain ground from Sinn Féin.
The UUP's Alan McFarland certainly thought so. He said: "Either the SDLP have found out what stations are going to be closed and are trying to steal a march on SF by making this demand knowing that it will be fulfilled, or in the rush to 'out-Sinn Féin' Sinn Féin they are demanding closures against the advice of the chief constable."
McFarland's explanation certainly had the ring of truth about it. Of course there may be simpler reasons which never occurred to him: amateurism, weariness, political incompetence, none of which you can ever rule out. You have to ask if the SDLP met the chief constable the previous Monday, when were they going to go public? Why not hold a press conference on Thursday to upstage SF's meeting in Downing Street, or even on Friday morning to wreck the coverage of the Downing Street meeting?
The whole episode provides an excellent illustration of the rivalry for the nationalist vote between SF and the SDLP and the abject position to which the Irish and British governments have consigned the SDLP. In making his demands of the republican movement last October Tony Blair handed them a huge platter of bargaining counters in much the same way as David Trimble did with his incessant demands from 1998.
Quite naturally Sinn Féin responded, 'Right, if you want us to swallow all that in one go, then what are you going to do for us?' Brilliantly Blair even told the world he hadn't implemented the Agreement, thereby supplying SF with a list of demands they can make of him. This they duly did in the form of a fifty page dossier they delivered in December. If a deal is struck in the next six weeks it will be on the basis of those SF demands and everyone knows it.What are the results of this? First, the other parties feel humiliated traipsing up to Stormont to provide a mobile tableau while the real business is being conducted elsewhere and by others.
Secondly, the SDLP are left with their noses pressed to the window while the Taoiseach and prime minister discuss SF's proposals and the UUP response over Jamie Oliver's scallops and champ.
Third and most important, if there is a deal, the election in May will be fought on that deal's merits. It will therefore be a contest between SF and the UUP.
Nationalists will be rooting for the 'imaginative moves' republicans have made and unionists will be urged to approve of the concessions David Trimble has wrung from the IRA.
The DUP will be isolated and the SDLP will have no option but to support the deal Sinn Féin have struck. Watch for more desperate and pitifully obvious attempts to 'out-Sinn Féin' Sinn Féin.
