Why does the UUP get such a poor press? After all, David Trimble is an architect of the Good Friday agreement. Trimble and his Assembly party have shown tremendous courage in promoting the peace process although assailed on all sides. But apart from The Irish Times, the sour note is the one heard most in the British and Irish media. Why is this? What can be done about it?

The why first. The answer is that the UUP is outside the media consensus. A consensus is an agreement to agree about something. Think of it as a circle of metal charged with electricity. Stay inside the circle and you are safe; step outside and you get mugged by the media.

In a modern democracy no party can defy a media consensus for long. And in two areas, the Good Friday agreement and decommissioning, the UUP is seen to be fully or partially outside the consensus.

First, the Good Friday agreement. The media consensus is that the agreement is not only a good thing, but the only thing. All the UUP has to do to get a good press is to go out and sell the agreement. Apart from David Trimble, it has not been seen to do so. By and large, it has stood just inside the circle, shuffling its feet close to the invisible force field, sometimes stumbling over and getting a sharp shock. As long as the UUP is lukewarm about the agreement, it will have media problems.

Second, decommissioning. The UUP slogan has been "no guns, no government". For many months, that was the media consensus too.

The slogan summed up a simple matter of right and wrong. What British or Irish leader would take the political representatives of a private army into government? If Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern wouldn't do it, why should David Trimble? Poll after poll showed that most people felt it should be guns before government. But not now.

The problem is that the charge of electricity is not constant. In Britain and in the Republic the consensus on guns before government is giving way to a growing consensus that if government came first, the guns would follow.

Hence the growing hostility to the UUP case, which, on moral grounds, is far superior to that of Sinn Fein. We may deplore this development.

But we must deal with it.

What to do about it? Many UUP members will not like the answer. Luckily they know that I am one of their warmest friends, an implacable enemy of the irredentist ideology of the Provisional IRA. So here goes. The UUP should give Sinn Fein seats in government. There should be no conditions, post-dated resignations, or conditional clauses. It should seat them, fold its arms, and wait. Within minutes the whole world will be asking Sinn Fein: what are you going to do about the IRA?

How did I arrive at this conclusion? With great difficulty. Let me trace the steps. Like most democrats, I found myself stuck fast in the moral fog of the peace process. Guns before government was a good slogan. But it was doing David Trimble no good.

So I asked myself two basic questions. Did I believe that the Provisional IRA's armed struggle for a united Ireland was over? Did I believe that Sinn Fein was willing to act as a democratic party?

After reading almost every republican document in the public domain, and after reflecting on the pattern of calls for change from such diverse activists as Patrick Wilson, Michael McMullan and Danny Morrison, and after pondering the fact that supporting the Good Friday agreement is an implicit acceptance of the status quo, I concluded the old war was over.

So was Sinn Fein sincere about democracy? Up to a point, Lord Copper. Sinn Fein is like a car thief who tells himself he is going straight but cannot help trying the handle of every car he passes.

Sinn Fein has abandoned the armed struggle. But it has two new political projects: to replace the SDLP and to wrong-foot the unionists in the eyes of the world. Sinn Fein sees the world as a stage where whoever says yes holds the high moral ground and wins. Saying no is always outside a media consensus. You can only say yes but.

Since Sinn Fein has a new strategy the UUP needs one too. Trimble's critics, Jeffrey Donaldson and John Taylor, have no such strategy. Donaldson urges the UUP to step outside the circle of consensus - which means media death. Taylor goes golfing in political terms - you come home to find the TV broken and the children crying, so you go off to the golf club and shoot the breeze with the good ol' boys. The problems are still there tomorrow.

David Trimble never goes golfing. But he needs a new strategy that will put the UUP inside the consensus circle. Let me suggest a two-pointed plan. The first step is simple: sell the Good Friday agreement with gusto. The second seems more difficult: dump the decommissioning issue back on the British and Irish governments. Because it is not a burden which the UUP should bear alone. If the British army, the RUC and the SAS could not disarm the IRA, why should the UUP have to shoulder the burden?

The UUP must untie itself from this false moral hook. The UUP's only obligation is to deal with the political manifestation of the IRA, which is Sinn Fein. The appropriate authority for dealing with the IRA is the British government and its security forces. As long as the UUP carries the albatross of decommissioning around, Gerry Adams, John Hume, Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair do not have to do so. But why should the UUP be the only cork in the bottle?

Right now, the British government wants the UUP to bring gunmen into government. It should do so. The world will then shine a cold spotlight on Sinn Fein. The UUP can sit back and watch Sinn Fein squirm. Suppose the IRA don't disarm after that? That's Tony Blair's problem. It is the UUP's problem only if it has set preconditions. Which is why there should be none.

Eoghan Harris is a political columnist with the Sunday Times