No Prime Minister will have the configuration of his Cabinet dictated to him. The Unionist leader has simply made it marginally less easy for Mr Blair to bring Ms Mowlam home from Belfast. I suspect that the real object of Mr Trimble's wrath is the Prime Minister himself for setting a time limit which Unionists fear is designed to bounce them into making concessions. Yes, there are perils to laying down deadlines, the most obvious of which is the vacuum of credibility that will be left if this one is not met. But the Prime Minister had to be alert to the equal dangers of letting things drift.
Momentum is one of the most powerful forces in politics.
What does not progress will regress. I can't believe that any of the principal players are actively willing a return to the disfigured past. But without a compromise, they will make certain that violence again becomes Northern Ireland's future. The third Third Way found by Tony Blair offers just a glimpse of hope. Sinn Fein will be admitted to government only on the unequivocal promise, a pledge that has never before been offered, that the IRA's arsenal will be put beyond use by next May. Decommissioning will have to occur to timetable on penalty of the executive being terminated.