The prolonged and cruelly public decline of the remarkable Mo Mowlam meant that at least she won considered obituaries.
The job that allowed her to shine, an odd and unconsidered occupation, lit up briefly while she held it and faces as indefinite a future as the peace process she nurtured.
The DUP and Sinn Féin hesitate over the next difficult steps and "direct rule" substitutes for real politics yet again. Peter Hain may have all the assurance in the world, but Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is a job for a stand-in: not the real thing.
Personality counts, and the Mowlam style became her monument and her downfall. But though it suited unionists and republicans to deal directly with the prime minister and it suited him eventually to disown her, she arrived in Belfast as Tony Blair's good servant.
A total of 15 people have "directly ruled" the North, at least to judge by the powers at their disposal.
From Willie Whitelaw in 1972 to Hain today, none of them has been the colonial "proconsul" of heated and sometimes understandably scornful local opinion - much as some might have liked to be.
Whitelaw breezed in with enormous assurance, had secret talks with the young Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and set up the Sunningdale negotiations, but Whitelaw was Ted Heath's man, not his own.
Some have 30-year-old memories of Roy Mason's beaming satisfaction at a visit from Queen Elizabeth, and his admiration for the SAS operations that made several IRA units as vulnerable as their own victims.
However much he came to personify it, Mason did not dream up the policy of hammering the IRA by himself.
Even if entirely inspired by British army, police or intelligence chiefs or the prime minister of the day, signing off on measures like tapping of phones and bugging of homes or cars, releasing or redetaining prisoners, and vetoing the employment of individuals in the name of security without revealing specific reasons, has made some preen and others quake a little.
James Prior (September 1981- September 1984) famously noted that he preferred not to know what his spooks were up to: safer all round.
Others have enjoyed examining intelligence dossiers, chewing over risks with the guys in uniform, and being told by officials that "the final decision, of course, secretary of state, is up to you". In terms of delusions of grandeur and the politician's need for prominence the job scores pretty well, at least when Northern Ireland makes the news.
But even those who were significant political players at home came to Belfast to do the bidding of Downing Street. While Britain was at war with the IRA, how could it be otherwise? And in this latter-day era, when the representatives of a make-over IRA have been brought into politics as part of a new Northern settlement, grindingly slow in the making, the place is still deemed too sensitive to have a secretary of state who behaves with even the limited autonomy of an ordinary cabinet minister.
Most probably pretty quickly find the grandeur superficial: largely confined, apart from permanent police protection which few could like, to bed and full board in Hillsborough Castle.
Some profess to enjoy entertaining assorted worthies to dinner and shaking hands at reception after reception. Others drift around as though they're living in a National Trust property without the charm, subsisting for the most part on only slightly poshed-up school dinners.
In the eyes of many who have come in contact with the series from Whitelaw to Hain, with special reference perhaps to Francis Pym, Merlyn Rees, Humphrey Atkins, Douglas Hurd and Tom King, to name a third of the total, they can seem a slightly forlorn lot - ill at ease, mystified or repelled by the natives.
As for their usefulness, Peter Mandelson (October 1999 to January 2001) in a typically magisterial obituary of Mowlam - which managed never to address the belief that she had been undermined in part for his benefit - noted unionist loathing for Mowlam as an example of how identification with one of the main local power groups erodes a Northern secretary's shelf life.
He omitted to mention how nationalists detested him. But he did conclude, unarguably, that "without exception, the province tires of its secretaries of state after a relatively short time".
Of course, odd though direct rule may be, a secretary of state's subservience to the prime minister of the day bears comparison to the relationship between Dublin ministers with notional responsibility for the North, and their taoisigh.
It was Garret, Charlie, Albert and Bertie who took the lead at the key moments - not those other fellows, some of them no more memorable than the long ago Francis Pym, London's man in Northern Ireland for a whole three months.