At prime minister's Question Time in the House of Commons on February 9th, Peter Mandelson, the Northern Ireland secretary, sat beside Tony Blair looking depressed and exhausted. His last-minute efforts to keep the peace process on track seemed likely to come to nothing. The strain was showing elsewhere, too. Gerry Adams, the normally smooth and assured leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, also seemed unusually edgy, as legislation to suspend Northern Ireland's assembly wended its way through Parliament in Westminster (see Bagehot on page 58).
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