"Something has gone seriously wrong. But what is it?" The question is Peter Mandelson's, according to the leaked Philip Gould memo of last week. With regard to the Northern Ireland Police Bill, which has left the House of Commons for the House of Lords, the relevant answer is himself. In fact, he is running out of time to avert disaster.
Disaster may come in two forms. Its mildest form is taking shape.
The SDLP, Sinn Fein, the Irish Government, Irish America, the American government, the Women's Coalition, human rights NGOs, the Catholic Church in Ireland, and Irish nationalist civil society have, accurately, condemned the emerging Act as a betrayal of the Patten report, and of the Belfast Agreement, both in letter and spirit.
In consequence, the SDLP and Sinn Fein will not recommend that their constituents consider joining the police, and they may well boycott the Policing Board and District Policing Partnership boards. That will leave the police without Patten's promised "new beginning", lacking full legitimacy with just less than half the local electorate, an institutional bomb waiting to explode. The outbreak of armed conflict in 1969 was partly caused by an unreformed, half-legitimate police service, responsible for seven of the first eight deaths.
In its strongest form, disaster would de-couple nationalists and republicans from the agreement. Failure to deliver Patten will mean Sinn Fein will find it difficult to get the IRA to go further in decommissioning, which in turn will lead to unionist calls for the exclusion of Sinn Fein from office, and possibly to a repeat of Mr Trimble's "decommission or I'll resign" gambit.
If decommissioning does not happen because of Mandelson's failure to deliver Patten, the SDLP will not be able or willing to help prioritise decommissioning, unless it prefers electoral suicide. The IRA will find it difficult to prevent further departures to the so-called "Real IRA", except by refusing to budge on arms. In short, a second collapse of the agreement's institutions looms. Something is going "seriously wrong".
How did we get here? The short answer is that the Bill was drafted by the Northern Ireland Office's officials under Mr Mandelson's supervision. They "forgot" that the Patten Commission's terms of reference came from the Belfast Agreement, and that Patten's report and 175 recommendations represented the carefully researched compromise between the unionist belief that the RUC met the terms of reference of the agreement and the republican demand that the RUC be disbanded.
The Secretary of State and his officials believed they had the right to implement those bits of Patten they found acceptable, and to leave aside those they found unacceptable, premature, or likely to cause difficulties for Trimble or the RUC.
This led to a big lie: the Bill was presented to Parliament as the implementation of Patten when it manifestly was not. One of Patten's commissioners, Dr Lynch, publicly pointed this out, and some others have privately confirmed Mr Lynch is right. In response to Irish and American condemnation, Mr Mandelson promised, including in the Guardian newspaper, to listen. He declared he might have been a bit too cautious, indicated the Bill could be modified in Parliament, and suggested his critics were engaging in hype.
The Bill has been improved in the Commons but too little.*
The quota for the recruitment of Catholics is now better protected, but not as strongly as Patten recommended. The Policing Board, rather than the Secretary of State, has been given power over the setting of short-run objectives, and final responsibility for the police's code of ethics.
Consultation procedures involving the Ombudsman and the Equality Commission have been strengthened, and the First and Deputy First Ministers will now be consulted over the appointment of non-party members to the board. Yet any honest external appraisal of the modified Bill would report that it is still not the whole Patten - a fact insufficiently appreciated in Ireland's media.
If the first draft of the Bill eviscerated Patten, the latest version paints and dresses the mummy. Even at the Commons report stage the SDLP was treated appallingly - with the British government dropping its own promised amendments. In consequence, Mr Mallon's relations with Mandelson are at an all-time low.
What needs to be done to resurrect the real Patten? The following minimum would help, and needs to be strongly commended by the Government to the British government through the British-Irish inter-governmental conference.
Patten recommended the name of the police service be entirely new: The Northern Ireland Police Service. The Bill calls the service "the Police Service of Northern Ireland (incorporating the Royal Ulster Constabulary)". The Secretary of State promised an amendment to define "for operational purposes" - to ensure that the full title would rarely be used, and that the parenthetic past generally be excluded.
He broke this commitment at report stage. The House of Lords must restore Patten, either by time-limiting "incorporating the RUC", or, preferably, by deleting it. Mandelson's own dropped amendment would also be helpful.
Mandelson misleads when he says Patten wanted the new service to be connected to the old and to avoid suggestions of disbanding. True, but that was not the whole Patten: he proposed an entirely new and fresh name, and proposed linkages between the old and new services through police memorials, not the renaming proposed by Ken Maginnis of the UUP with Mandelson's approval.
Patten also unambiguously recommended that the new badge and emblems for the service be free of association with the British or Irish states, and that the Union flag should not fly from police buildings. The Bill, as amended, fails to do any of this. Mr Mandelson may not have intended to subvert Patten here, but he has not even told a half-Patten by way of explanation.
Patten recommended that there should be an Oversight Commissioner to "supervise the implementation of our recommendations". The British government has now put the commissioner on a statutory basis, but confined his role to overseeing changes "decided by the government". If Mr Mandelson was committed to Patten he would charge the commissioner with recommending legislative and other changes necessary for the full implementation of the Patten report, not the emergent Act.
It is essential that the Taoiseach and Mr Cowen press for the Oversight Commissioner's role to be that envisaged by Patten. That would create the possibility that the full implementation of Patten could occur later, and help avert a crisis.
Patten recommended a board with the ability to hold the police to account, and to initiate inquiries into police conduct and practices. Mr Mandelson has prevented the truth emerging about the police's past by stopping the board from inquiring into any act or omission arising before the eventual Act applies. This is an undeclared amnesty for past police misconduct, and was not proposed by Patten.
The Secretary of State now has the power to prevent inquiries because they "would serve no useful purpose", an addition at the report stage, again not in Patten. He has also given himself powers to order the Chief Constable to take steps in the interests of economy, efficiency, and effectiveness, whereas Patten envisaged this role for the board. Patten recommended the Ombudsman "should exercise the right to investigate and comment on police policies and practices". The Bill represents a half-Patten: the Ombudsman may make reports but not investigate (so it is not a crime to obstruct her work).
Lastly, Patten recommended disbanding the full-time reserve, encouraging international standards of human rights beyond the European Convention, normalising the police through merging the Special Branch and the CID, and closing a series of interrogation centres "forthwith". On all this, the Bill and implementation plan are either ominously silent or unclear.
If the Taoiseach obliges Mr Mandelson to address all these issues, with a little help from the Lords, he will go some way to avoiding disaster, and restoring faith in the British government's integrity.
If he does not, then a new charge should be brought against Mr Mandelson, "vexatiously wasting Parliament's time". Two Acts of Parliament addressing policing in Northern Ireland will have been passed under the Blair government, and neither will have fulfilled the function of integrating Northern nationalists into the new political, legal and policing arrangements promised by the Belfast Agreement.
This charge will be in addition to Mr Mandelson's previous offence of breaking international law by unilaterally suspending the agreement's institutions - a charge the Irish Government decided not to pursue. Mr Mandelson was lucky once; he is unlikely to be lucky twice. Mr Ahern and Mr Blair need to step in to supervise Mandelson's mismanagement and temper his low-grade Machiavellian conduct.
There is no substitute for Patten; it must be the whole Patten.
*I have avoided inserting a comma after "Commons" and added emphasis to avoid this sentence being misleadingly quoted by Mr Mandelson. Having seen how he recently misled American politicians through selective quotation such precautions are now a necessary feature of public dialogue with Mr Mandelson.
Brendan O'Leary is professor of political science at the London School of Economics and a former adviser to Dr Mo Mowlam; he is also co- author of Policing Northern Ireland, published in 1999