The prominent Ulster Unionist Mr John Taylor has warned he will step aside as a party negotiator if the decommissioning of IRA weapons is dropped as a requirement for Sinn Fein participation in government in Northern Ireland.
Mr Taylor, who is deputy leader of the UUP at Westminster, gave the warning in a letter to his party leader, Mr David Trimble. However, sources close to the Strangford MP insisted the letter was not "leaked" by Mr Taylor.
Mr Taylor wrote to his party leader regularly on all sorts of issues, sources close to him continued. He was only reiterating the position in the Hillsborough draft agreement which specified that potential Sinn Fein ministers could be named on a temporary basis, but these nominations would lapse if there was no decommissioning. The Strangford MP is currently in Paris, attending the assembly of the Western European Union. Speaking to the Press Association news agency, he criticised the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, for indicating Sinn Fein could serve in government if the party said decommissioning was desirable and it condemned those who failed to bring it about.
"That is not acceptable. For Ulster Unionists to proceed on that basis would be to dishonour our election pledges and to accept a totally undemocratic arrangement, i.e., ministers in an executive who still had [or perhaps are] members in a private army.
"I have, therefore, written to Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble to advise him that I would prefer to resign as one of the three UUP negotiators if ever this proposal was on the agenda."
This episode involving Mr Taylor comes two days after the party's security spokesman at Westminster, Mr Ken Maginnis, criticised him bitterly for refusing to endorse the UUP's European candidate, Mr Jim Nicholson. "It is treacherous to deal with a colleague like that and I can only despise what John Taylor has done on the run-up to this election," Mr Maginnis told RTE Radio One on Monday. Meanwhile, the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, yesterday warned unionists that the new Assembly at Stormont might be the only institution under the Belfast Agreement which would be lost if the executive was not formed by the June 30th deadline.
Mr Adams, who said he believed the devolved executive could be formed by the deadline, said the onus was on Ulster Unionists to stop blocking its formation.
The West Belfast MP said: "The Unionists will only face up to their responsibilities in terms of this agreement when the British government does what it has commenced doing by making it very clear that there is no alternative.
"The Unionists have to decide whether they can continue in perpetuity with this farce of an assembly which can't even meet at the moment for fear that d'Hondt [the mechanism for forming an executive] will be triggered, when the first item on the agenda is the expulsion of Sinn Fein by the Democratic Unionist Party."
The Sinn Fein president said a democratic peace settlement was "inevitable" and could not be stopped by unionists.
A spokesman for the anti-agreement Union First group, Mr Peter King, accused Mr Blair of "insulting the majority of unionists unhappy with the current process".
The d'Hondt system of allocating ministries in the Stormont Assembly is named after the 19th-century Belgian lawyer Victor d'Hondt. Parties are initially ranked according to the number of seats won in the Assembly elections. The party with the highest number of seats is the first to receive a ministry. Its seat total is divided by two and that party rejoins the queue for further posts. If it receives a second ministry, its original seat total is then divided by three and the party takes its place in the rank to receive a possible third executive post. The process continues until all ministerial positions have been allocated. When the d'Hondt system is applied to the allocation of the 10 vacant ministerial posts the distribution is as follows: UUP - 3; SDLP - 3; Sinn Fein - 2; DUP - 2. A version of the d'Hondt procedure is also used in the Japanese political system.