Jeffery Donaldson and Reg Empey. An Ulster Unionist "dream ticket"? Nightmare on Downing Street? Or a daft idea waiting (if ever put to the test) to fall apart under the weight of its inherent contradictions, asks Frank Millar.
Sir Reg may feel some impatience at finding the idea once more in the public domain. Only recently, after all, did he confirm his view that David Trimble would and should lead the UUP into next year's Assembly elections. No, he had not been party to discussions about replacing Mr Trimble, nor had he authorised others to act on his behalf. Fellow party officers or Assembly members engaged in such talk should, he advised, "desist."
Clear enough, as far as it goes. However, Sir Reg did not quite close the door on the possibility that, in some future circumstance, he and Mr Donaldson might provide the nucleus of a new unionist leadership. Asked if the dream ticket scenario was credible, he replied that, because of his answers in respect of Mr Trimble's position, this was not an issue.
In fairness, we are not necessarily entitled to make too much of this. Sir Reg may have declined to speak on the record, and confined himself to very limited replies to the questions subsequently submitted, because he had no wish to give the story legs.
Be that as it may, he left it with legs enough - certainly for those pro-agreement Assembly members who believe that, between them, Sir Reg and Mr Donaldson probably represent the UUP's best alternative to electoral disaster next May. And, of course, it is the fact that it is pro-agreement unionists who have been sponsoring this plan which spells real potential danger for Mr Trimble.
For some time it has seemed clear that Mr Donaldson and his allies cannot muster the necessary numbers to oust the First Minister. They appear determined to have another tilt in September and may yet prove that wrong. Their high point until now was the Rev Martin Smyth's audacious bid for the leadership, on just two days' notice, and his staggering 46 per cent share of the vote. Since then Mr Trimble's majority on the Ulster Unionist Council has marginally increased, twice.
The dissidents believe they will get Mr Trimble in the end, if only after their party's defeat at the hands of the DUP. However, that must be an unappealing prospect for Mr Donaldson, who might find himself leading a UUP rump but playing second-fiddle in a changed unionist landscape increasingly dominated by Dr Paisley's deputy, Mr Peter Robinson.
So the Lagan Valley MP will hardly have discouraged those pro-agreement unionists when they sought to persuade him that he and Sir Reg offered the best chance of reuniting the UUP and staving off the prospect of a Robinson ascendancy - not to mention their own best hope of keeping their Stormont seats.
Such personal calculations are hardly surprising. Indeed he would be a poor and ultimately doomed politician who did not remain properly focused on the imperatives of securing re-election. It's perfectly plain what might be in it for the plotters. What is less clear is why they might imagine Mr Donaldson and Sir Reg a better bet than Mr Trimble to preserve them and the entire devolution project.
For is there not a glaring inherent contradiction in the concept of coalition between Sir Reg, the man who actually negotiated the Strand One part of the Good Friday settlement, and Mr Donaldson who, had he had his way, would by now have collapsed the entire edifice?
AH, comes the soothing reply, but Jeffrey is too cute for that. He knows that would finally split the party and ensure the DUP's dominance. And why would he want to do that anyway, they retort when even the DUP does not really want to wreck the Assembly?
So the dream-ticket theory runs on. A party grown weary of warfare seizes the opportunity to unite behind a new leadership team, which in turn uses the traditional "honeymoon" period to confront the DUP with its own alleged hypocrisies and inconsistencies over the agreement. The pitch for electoral survival would obviously necessitate lots of tough talk about holding paramilitaries to account and preserving the integrity of the democratic process. And after - with the DUP challenge successfully repelled? With Sinn Féin still entitled to a place in government? Well, says one dreamer, "Jeffrey can explain that he didn't start with a clean slate and that there were always going to be limits to what he could do to improve on the situation he inherited from Trimble."
This is not convincing. For starters, it suggests an approach to politics which might incline the unionist electorate to kick the lot of them out with contempt. As they would surely be contemptuous, having endured the trauma of Trimble's removal only to discover that Donaldson, Empey or whoever had claimed the top job while changing little else. It is also almost certainly based on a complete misunderstanding of Mr Donaldson.
He rejected the Belfast Agreement because it did not guarantee IRA decommissioning - a position he certainly has considered vindicated by every tortured UUP twist and turn on the issue in the intervening years. Unlike Mr Trimble, he was serious in recent weeks in seeking Sinn Féin's exclusion because of Colombia and Castlereagh. If he became leader before the Assembly election, he would have to frame a policy to match the DUP's pledge to force a renegotiation of the agreement. And, above all, Mr Donaldson knows that he cannot (any more, by the way, than can the DUP) promise to remove Sinn Féin from office while somehow maintaining the structure of devolved government.
Unionists may well decide to finish with Mr Trimble - in the autumn, or next May. But they should not delude themselves that in doing so they would be choosing a better way to save Stormont. The alternative to devolution with Sinn Féin is Direct Rule.