Who would stand in Mr David Trimble's shoes this weekend? Cold assessment and historical precedent might suggest that all roads lead in one direction - towards inevitable political death. Yet in a sense that is where Senator Mitchell came in and where his review began. Back in September Mr Trimble cut a lonely figure, a prisoner of his own hardliners. This newspaper urged him to action; to construct a credible and achievable political agenda; and, above all, to re-connect with those unionists who had kept faith with the Belfast Agreement. He has shown, and still shows, every determination to do so and must be applauded for that. But he has clearly been badly - perhaps fatally - damaged in the process of searching for a compromise formula to let Sinn Fein into government without an actual start to the decommissioning of IRA weapons.
The figures are not encouraging. Seven of nine available MPs and close to one third of the Assembly Party still say no. Mr John Taylor has not returned to the fold and stands pledged now to lead the opposition. Mr Jeffrey Donaldson is increasingly spoken of as a leader-in-waiting. But where would they lead unionism post the collapse of the Agreement? It is a question Mr Trimble and his supporters should now carry all the way to the Ulster Unionist Council. The fact of the matter is that Mr Trimble still commands a majority at Stormont in favour of putting this deal to the party's rank and file.
It will be a bloody, bruising battle, with no certainty of victory. However Mr Trimble has always known that if the Agreement is to work he will have to part company with his rejectionists. And if it is not to work, who would want to lead a party mired in international opprobrium because it prefers the certainties of conflict to the challenges of peace? That said, if Mr Trimble is to take this desperate gamble he is entitled to the support and assistance of all those parties - and of Sinn Fein in particular - urging him on.
Republicans have undoubtedly sought to move forward at this point and the resolution and commitment of Mr Adams and his team must be acknowledged. But Sinn Fein did the process a disservice during the week by spinning the nature and purpose of the putative agreement, even as Mr Trimble prepared to commend it to his colleagues. Many were only too ready to seize on reports that Mr Trimble alone had compromised - and that the appointment of an IRA interlocutor to interface with General de Chastelain was no guarantee that decommissioning would ever occur. As a matter of urgency all sides should confirm they regard the appointment of an interlocutor as tangible commitment by the republican movement to see decommissioning take place alongside the overall implementation of the Agreement.
If Mr Trimble cannot give his party such clarity of commitment then he may feel he must find an alternative way to meet Mr Peter Mandelson's whispered challenge to call the republican bluff. Such an alternative was advanced by some of his advisers in July and is still available to him. It would have the virtue of removing all reliance on words and their interpretation and make Mr Trimble master of events. Put simply, he could agree to form the Executive on the working assumption that republicans intend to keep their side of the bargain. And he could enforce it by placing his and his ministers' post-dated letters of resignation with the presiding officer of the Assembly, to take immediate effect should the IRA fail to comply by the designated date. That would certainly meet Mr Mandelson's demand for "certainty of intention" on all sides.