What's in a name? In the minds of many unionists, everything, when the name in question is of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
It is understood the Patten Report on reform of the RUC will be published in the second week of September. The general expectation is that its headline proposal will be to complete the work begun by Mo Mowlam, scrap the "Royal" title, and re-launch the force as the Northern Ireland Police Service. And John Taylor says if this expectation is realised unionists will reject Patten out of hand.
Mr Taylor's warning undoubtedly reflects the growing apprehension within his party and the wider unionist community. Unionist "rejectionists" have always reckoned the final battle over the Belfast Agreement would resolve itself around the issue of the RUC. David Trimble has been steadily losing ground since the heady days immediately following the Good Friday accord.
Events this summer, when the process crash-landed, reflected the belief of many in the Ulster Unionist Party that continued devotion to the agreement amounts to an electoral suicide pact. And events since, calling the nature and integrity of the IRA "cessation" into question, will have further disinclined the UUP to place too much trust in the man who finally brought the Union flag down over Hong Kong.
For many unionists, attachment to the royal title is largely a matter of sentiment. For others, probably more: its abolition would mark a further assault on Ulster's very Britishness.
The clever commentator might make light of continuing unionist "paranoia", reminding Ulster Unionists, in particular, they sold the Belfast Agreement on the basis that it had settled the constitutional position.
But Mr Trimble has barely carried, let alone won, that argument within his community. Moreover, his perceived failings apart, the continued activities of paramilitaries on both sides have done nothing to reassure those genuinely fearful that the peace process is less to do with constructing a bridge to bring former paramilitaries into the democratic system than the means of enabling them to corrupt it.
IT IS perfectly arguable that this fear would have been most directly addressed, and most effectively answered, had Mr Trimble moved swiftly to get the executive and other institutions of the agreement up and running. However, there is little point lamenting what might have been. The fear is there and, while undoubtedly easily exploited by anti-agreement unionists, for many ordinary citizens is all too real.
It was expressed forcefully barely 24 hours after the Good Friday agreement by a veteran Belfast unionist. Unimpressed by David Trimble's constitutional achievements in negotiation, the old-timer dismissed the agreement as rotten at its core. "I know what's going to happen," he declared. "They're going to destroy the RUC, the Provos will police the Catholics and we'll be left to the mercies of the loyalists."
Mesh that fear with natural devotion to all things royal, and it's perfectly possible to believe John Taylor's prediction that the Ulster Unionists might end up shoulder to shoulder with the DUP in damning Mr Patten and all his works. However, the fear is unlikely to be realised. Chris Patten almost certainly knows his proposals would be still-born should he allow paramilitaries to trade their balaclavas for police uniforms and take official control of their respective ghettos.
And some other unionists are beginning to think it is against the second criterion, rather than the first, that the real judgments on Patten will have to be made.
Like John Taylor, they agree a change in title could prove a costly mistake, triggering an emotional spasm within unionism and diverting attention from the substance of the proposed reforms. But even in Northern Ireland, those waves of emotion and sentiment eventually subside.
Even if the political class of unionism rejects Patten wholesale, are Protestant/ unionist members of the force likely to resign en masse? Will potential recruits from that same community forgo the option because the force in future will take its title from the very political entity nationalists as well as republicans have so long denied? (The assumption here is that Mr Patten is not going to christen it "the Six County Police Service".)
There will be a furore, too, about the emblematic harp and crown. But pro-agreement unionists at least will have difficulty arguing for the retention of the badge of allegiance to the state. Recognition of the divided allegiances of the North's two communities was what inspired the "inclusive" nature of the Belfast Agreement in the first place.
More telling ultimately for unionists, surely, will be what Patten delivers in terms of a professional police force, complete with Special Branch and all the other machinery necessary to assure them of continued protection against terrorism, not to mention the drug and high-tech crimes already casting their shadow over the 21st century.
To work, Patten must assure law-abiding citizens that better, less contentious and more accountable policing will result. But the best assurance for society in Northern Ireland might ultimately be to see local politicians take charge of their police service.
The British government is ready "in principle" to devolve responsibility for policing and justice to the Stormont Assembly. Until now the possibility has been entirely theoretical. But with publication of Patten soon we will have the opportunity (and not for the first time in this process) to think the unthinkable.