Elections in Northern Ireland are like elections nowhere else and that crazy one, on-again off-again due on May 29, has been put off to some date in the autumn when tempers have cooled down after another long and perhaps hot summer.
The long awaited announcement came on May Day in an almost empty House of Commons. I must say Tony Blair never looked so shifty when he sought to justify his decision made – as the world and his wife knows – to save the skin of the embattled unionist leader ex-first minister David Trimble. In retrospect we should have known that no matter what assurances came from Gerry Adams about the IRA's endgame intentions they would be rejected on one excuse or another because Trimble had already intimated publicly that unionists would refuse to form a new administration at Stormont unless there was a grovelling surrender. Some hope! Trimble needed that for his election duel to the death with Paisley's DUP at the hustings.
Paisley, looking painted and powdered for TV after his recent ill-shrunken appearances and absence from the front line (are they keeping something back that we should know?), staged an expensive election rally in the gilded Odyssey. This is his last chance to become king of the unionist castle, but to the no doubt secret misgivings of his pushful lieutenants, Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds, he managed to flush down the basin their carefully organised scaremongering election strategy with a nasty unpleasant and cruel joke about the physical appearance of the Irish foreign minister, Brian Cowen. He followed up with a crude racist reference to people with thick lips? If he ever returns to his Free Presbyterian mission in the Cameroons, which I doubt after the last one, the natives are liable to do what their ancestors used to do to white missionaries... judging from the wide publicity given to Paisley's ill-timed abuse, the DUP has started its mistimed election campaign with a vital own goal. Looking back on his violent career as a religious tub-thumper-turned-politician nobody has done more to smash the unionist squirearachy domination by the big house. Some even ventured to speculate that one day he might see the light on the road to Damascus and use his oratorical gifts for a better cause in the new 21st century Ireland, but is this only a vain hope when it's getting so late?
By the way isn't it ironic that the loyalist UDA should decide to take the war to England's shores at the very moment when Blair and Trimble are harassing Sinn Féin about the IRA's ceasefire. A blind eye has been turned in those quarters to the blatant decision to send the loyalist gunmen to Bolton in Greater Manchester to attempt to murder Johnny Adair's family, seeking refuge there after their expulsion from the Shankill.
Not only that, but they have threatened to take action against any English people who dare to harbour Adair's fleeing followers including cut-throat White, presumably now on the run somewhere on the 'mainland'.
With all this talk of clarification about ceasefires there is a strange silence from the quarters that should be seeking answers.
Likewise, wasn't the sudden leaking of the bugged conversations between Downing Street, Martin McGuinness and Mo Mowlam at this crucial moment suggestive that the hidden hand of the spooks is still intent on its own agenda?
Finally isn't it sad to say goodbye to our old friend Mr P O'Neill, the Provo Pimpernel, alias the man-in-the-iron-mask, buried without military honours by Gerry Adams in his famous last reply to Number 10.
Blair says the "pantomine" is over. But is he not being optimistic? After all this is Neverneverland.
