FROM here John Major sits the situation must look quite grim enough and the Grim Reaper has yet to strike.
Barely a week ago City actuaries were forecasting the three or four deaths necessary to obliterate the prime minister's House of Commons majority. But that was before Ms Emma Nicholson's shock defection to the Liberal Democrats.
Assessments were promptly revised downwards.
Certain defeat in two pending by elections will bring Mr Major's majority down to just three. Two more defections, or two untimely deaths, will wipe it out.
Britain is facing the likelihood of a minority government before the summer draws to a close. And so the story of the week sets the scene for what might prove, after all, to be a momentous year in British politics.
In his best defiant fashion Mr Major has let it be known that he won't be blown off course "come hell or high water". To have any chance of electoral success, he needs to hang on until May 1997.
But there is now every possibility that the general election will be forced upon him come the autumn. Indeed the Scottish National Party leader, Mr Alex Salmond, predicts Mr Major will be hanging on "an Ulster rope" by the time the Orangemen revisit Drumcree.
So will Mr Major's difficulty be Ulster Unionism's opportunity? Conflicting signals from the party's MPs suggest they are not at all sure.
Mr David Trimble has dismissed all such talk as highly speculative, and he is certainly prudent to do so. The prime minister still has a majority to be going on with. Minority governments aren't automatically turfed out. And in any event, it may not necessarily fall to the Ulster Unionists to determine the government's fate.
Come the challenge of a critical Commons vote, spot the specialist interest of maverick MPs or the local concerns of minority parties. The last 15 months of the 1974 Labour government are a salutary reminder of politics as the art of the possible, and the expedient.
In the life of the present parliament, Mr Major has already benefited from the strategic calculations of assorted opposition groups. And as the recent fishing vote illustrates, not just any defeat will do. To force Mr Major from power, the Opposition needs to defeat him on an essentially "confidence" issue.
The government business managers will do their damnedest to keep any such issues off the Commons floor. Certainly we can be assured Mr Major won't be inviting any Commons judgments he can avoid on key economic or foreign policies. But they cannot account for the ingenuity of a Labour leader by now smelling blood.
Mr Blair will seek repeatedly to put Mr Major's fragile majority to the test. And with Tory backbenchers ever ready to rebel, issues like rail privatisation and VAT on domestic fuel may provide early opportunities to inflict further damage.
A run of defeats, if not life threatening in themselves, can sap the governing party's purpose and morale - and foster the impression of a tired and dejected administration limping toward its end. If and when the Grim Reaper obliges, Mr Blair will rally the forces for change.
At that point - provided all the other minority parties prove true to their word - Mr Trimble and his eight colleagues may come into their own.
Their traditional line has been well rehearsed over the past few days. They are not in the business of prematurely ending the life of the parliament, and will support any party in power which governs in the interests of the United Kingdom as a whole, and of Northern Ireland in particular.
Mr Ken Maginnis encouraged the first wave of reports translating this into a lifeline for Mr Major. But the UUP's deputy leader, Mr John Taylor, subsequently qualified the line, indicating they could not be taken for granted across the board.
While on economic issues the Ulster Unionists would be inclined to support Mr Major, he could not rely on them on the European issues on which he remains most at risk.
At first glance, this might have appeared simply a matter of tactics. But it might also reflect a genuine uncertainty in unionist ranks in defining where their own best interests lie.
Certainly nothing that the Ulster Unionists have said over the past few days constitutes a guarantee of any kind to the prime minister. And whether they would actually cast their votes to save him might well depend on when the day of reckoning comes.
Specifically, Mr Trimble might take one view of a confidence vote if it fell next month, and a very different view should it come toward the end of the year.
If the worst were to happen and Mr Major lost his majority, say, over the next two months, Mr Trimble could fairly easily justify a "conditional" endorsement of the prime minister.
Parliament, alter all, would still have more than a year to run, and "confidence" not sustained in the longer term could be withdrawn.
But if he should be called to make such a decision in the final weeks of this year? Barring a transformation in Tory fortunes in the meantime, would Mr Trimble see advantage in bolstering a government by then only a few short months away from a general election?
And might not any such ad vantage be outweighed by the inevitable alienation of the man seemingly set to succeed Mr Major?
The received wisdom in some unionist circles is that is precisely where Mr James Molyneaux and Mr Enoch Powell went wrong with Mrs Thatcher in 1979. While Mr Trimble savours his prospects, he may well reflect on that and on the events which gave him the leadership last September.