Stop press. The Christmas big deal of all deals is off. Instead of holly and mince pies for that peculiar celebration, it's now looking askance to the darling buds of May (perhaps).
The Ayatollah, once described by Cabinet Minister Roy Bradford as a back street Savonarola, has ruined two prime ministers' Christmas dinners by scuppering their best laid plans to bring the prolonged Ulster political hocus pocus to a satisfactory conclusion in time for dancing on the streets at Christmas Eve. (Look out Ian, Savonarola was executed for attacking the then Pope!).
However the local populace was not fooled.
They knew what the old fraud was about.
It was signalled in this column some time ago. His game plan is to 'decommission' Trimble and the UUP at the forthcoming British general election expected on May 5 next and emerge as a kind of Ulster supremo.
After that who knows?
Tame Sinn Féin and the IRA and then a Paisley parliament for the suffering Protestant people?
Not a hope in hell – just an old hot Gospeler's dream.
Down in Dublin where hope sprang eternal that they could do the impossible, even going to the length of springing the Garda McCabe killers, the penny dropped.
The Indo headline said it all: "Northern talks are sinking ship with no hope of rescue before summer."
So once again we are faced with a long haul. While the rest of the civilised world moves on to new futures we await another headcount in a British general election in the hope that some solution will eventually emerge to the mess which has resulted from the north's peculiar antediluvian sectarian politics.
Is there any parallel anywhere for this imbroglio?
I discussed this with a Canadian professor here on a visit, vastly amused at this spectacle of a Canadian general being dragged in to inspect the controversial disposal of sectarian arms.
He saw Paisley in much the same role as the mad mullahs presently causing mayhem in the Moslem world.
"These hare brained fundamentalists of all camps at opposite ends of the spectrum" he said "are squeezing out the moderate reasonable people in the middle so that in the end only the radicals stand facing each other in a 'Mexican standoff'. No more ground for reason, for progress and moderation."
To expect reason and progress and moderation from our own anti-romanists high priest, considering his past and present posturing, would be to expect the impossible.
Most people were incredulous when it looked like the two governments were intent on setting up Paisley, the DUP leader, as first minister in the revived Stormont assembly with Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness in the unlikely role as his assistant minister.
Fortunately for a peaceful Christmas it hasn't happened.
What would be the result?
Turmoil at Stormont... a bear garden?
With two years to go before his retirement at 80, Ian Paisley, founder of the Free Presbyterian Church – doubling as a politician – has evidently been enjoying his sudden access to star billing in our tragi-comedy telling the world of the efforts to drag the backward six counties, kicking and screaming into the new disposition of devolution.
His visit to 10 Downing Street with his now silenced supporting MPs, have gone on and on but without result.
He was pictured on his last visit approaching a closed door – the camera switched off at that intriguing moment.
Did they shut it when they saw him coming? Anyway why waste any more time listening to his stalling tactics?
We have heard it all, the baloney about guns, photos, sack-cloth-and-ashes for the IRA, the offer, quickly withdrawn, to discuss sin with Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams ('Let him without sin cast the first stone') and finally demanding an apology from Taoiseach Bertie Ahern about who said what.
All endlessly tiring and obviously a big bluff to gain time for the hidden agenda to be revealed six months hence.
Let's get back to basics as we all know them, However about the misleading headlines, get this straight.
It's as it was in the beginning: Keep 'the other side' out... no Taigs in positions of power.
It was the same after Sunningdale with no Sinn Féin or IRA in sight and more of the same for the new set-up, described as 'Sunningdale for late developers'.
My sympathy to Prime Minister Tony Blair and Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in the New Year.
Will they still keep trying to tie up the many loose ends in the unfinished business of the tangled future of poor old mixed-up Ulster...
Or will they be forced to produce Plan B before or after the election?
