The challenge facing Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, is relatively simple to state, if not to solve.
His party walked out of Stormont because of the trade border which Theresa May and Boris Johnson introduced between Northern Ireland and the mainland during the Brexit negotiations. Despite some wild overselling of the Windsor Framework last year, that border has not gone away.
Yet Donaldson has also likely realised that there are increasing downside risks to maintaining his boycott. There is simply no guarantee that it will lead to better outcomes for Unionism.
Unlike the several previous instances when the Assembly has collapsed – for example, when Sinn Fein walked out over the Coalition’s welfare reforms – the solution here isn’t something Westminster can easily give.
Historically, secretaries of state have been more than willing to pony up cash, and even deeply misjudged reforms to Stormont such as the St Andrews Agreement, in return for getting to look like a statesman (and to stop thinking about Ulster).
This is different; no good bribes are forthcoming. Risible suggestions, such as renaming the customs lane in the Irish Sea “the internal market lane”, are about where we are.
But if Stormont doesn’t come back, what then? Westminster has long since resiled from its responsibility to provide good government to Northern Ireland. Chris Heaton-Harris, like his recent predecessors, rules out direct rule; worse, he implies that any such arrangement would necessarily involve the Irish Government.
This is why, as I wrote last week, the DUP is right to be concerned about the implications of current arrangements for things like immigration policy, even if the complaint seems arcane at first glance.
(That this is again playing fast and loose with the Belfast Agreement’s guarantees about Ulster’s British status is by and by.)
If Donaldson wants a deal, however, he l faces a deeply unenviable task: to sell whatever he’s got as sufficient justification for returning to Stormont, without overselling it as an actual solution to the sea border, which will remain and against which unionists on both sides of the Irish Sea should continue to struggle.
He will know full well the perils of that course. After all, the DUP usurped the Ulster Unionists as the leading party of unionism precisely by attacking the compromises David Trimble made in the 1990s.
Fairly or no, Jim Allister’s Traditional Unionist Voice is waiting in the wings to do exactly the same thing, if it gets the chance.
It may well. The intransigent Ulsterman is a powerful and unflattering stereotype. But the DUP is not out on a limb over the Sea Border. Unionism is widely, and rightly, aghast at the discovery that in 1998 they apparently locked themselves into economic alignment with the Republic. They weren’t told that at the time, and no reciprocal restrictions have apparently been placed on Dublin’s freedom of regulatory manoeuvre.
This is why recent polling has found unionists saying they would not vote for the Belfast Agreement if it were put to them today, and why some loyalist groups have withdrawn their recognition of it.
We should not overstate the significance of this latter group, no more than the threat of republican violence should have been adduced against customs checks on the land border. Donaldson’s firm stand against those who have threatened him for seeking a deal is an example others in this debate would do well to heed.
But that deeper well of opposition, drawn from unionism’s middle opinion, he cannot afford to ignore. Not if he wishes to remain its leader.