A late night at Hillsborough Castle for the PMs

The latest I hear from Hillsborough is that Martin McGuiness arrived at 6.30pm to join the talks. All the main players are now in the building. The two Prime Minister are expecting a late night.

The two tricks now needed will be familiar to Tony Blair and former Taoiseachs. You have to build confidence in relationships where it is pretty thin and at the same time work on the choreography or sequencing so what currently looks offensive to one side is something they can actually swallow and defend.

Sinn Fein finds it offensive that the DUP is asking for the abolition of the Parades Commission as a pre-condition of devolving policing and justice powers to Stormont – devolution, they say, is part of the Agreement anyway and you can’t just add conditions.

The Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams recently pointed out that the DUP won’t even share a lift with him at Stormont. Gordon Brown is in the unlikely role of relationship counsellor tonight. The hope for supporters of the Agreement must come from the fact that fresh Stormont elections won’t necessarily help anyone.

Nobody knows what they would do to Unionism.

Though the secret Hatfield House talks, a week ago, attended by the Conservative’s Northern Ireland spokesman, Owen Paterson, appear to have been trying to shore up unionism’s position with a UUP/DUP electoral pact to keep Peter Robinson or another Unionist in the top job and stop Martin McGuinness from getting it. (David Cameron gave his support to this initiative today in his press conference – we haven’t heard the last on this one, I suspect.)

The fundamental point of relevance to tonight is that no supporters of the Agreement are sure that an election would help matters and that gives the governments hope at Hillsborough.