The two major parties in Britain hold their annual conferences next week and the week after, and for the first time in many years Northern Ireland will feature on the agenda as a good news story. There are still great problems, particularly on decommissioning, but the air of optimism about progress on the North is almost palpable. Labour meets in Blackpool next week and the North will be flagged as a major success, both domestically and internationally for the PM, Tony Blair. The signing of the Belfast Agreement last Easter will be hailed as evidence of how good his government is and how it has solved, on paper anyway, a problem that has dogged British politics for generations.
At the Conservatives' gathering in Bournemouth the following week Ireland will hardly feature at all. Still tied up with arguments over Europe, the Tories cannot attack the success story that is the North. Indeed, since the party lost power and William Hague took over 18 months ago, even issue of security in the North, so long a Tory preserve, has hardly featured on their agenda at all. The Ulster Unionist Party is now working far more closely with Labour than with the Conservative and Unionist Party (its official title) and David Trimble has become close to Blair.
The main issue at Bournemouth will be the Tories themselves - how they deal with Europe, with Ken Clarke and with Michael Portillo, whose TV programme Portillo's Progress is being seen as part of a serious bid for leadership once he can regain a Commons seat. Indeed, they say, he is presenting himself as the future of the party.
The North's First Minister, David Trimble, will address both conferences and the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, will speak to a meeting of the left-wing Tribune group in Blackpool next week.
Although the need to win friends and influence people is now almost redundant, given past successes, the Irish embassy in Britain will he hosting a party at each conference, the only embassy to do so. Always jolly occasions, they should be considerably more so now.