Election Diary: David Ervine pulled out of the Westminster election yesterday, which makes East Belfast more interesting. He'll be campaigning for a place on Belfast City Council but won't be challenging the DUP deputy leader Peter Robinson for a seat in the House of Commons in East Belfast.
Ervine's withdrawal gives the Ulster Unionist Westminster candidate, Sir Reg Empey, something more than a theoretical chance of winning the seat from Ian Paisley's presumed heir apparent.
In the Assembly elections in 2003, the DUP polled 2,000 votes more than the UUP. In the same election, Ervine polled 3,000 votes, and if the votes of the Progressive Unionist Party transferred to Sir Reg, then he could defeat Robinson.
Based on the last Westminster battle in 2001, the combined UUP and PUP vote would not topple Robinson, but the candidate then was the relatively unknown Tim Lemon. Empey carries more clout.
Alliance has a strong candidate in East Belfast, Naomi Long, and how she fares will probably tell whether one of the biggest upsets of the election is on the cards.
Alliance and PUP supporters voting tactically for Empey would make it troublesome for Robinson. An upset would also depend on a considerable number of the 3,000 or so SDLP and Sinn Féin supporters voting UUP.
Odds are still in Robinson's favour but at least for the election obsessives, East Belfast is now quietly unpredictable. "Peter Robinson has always been a minority candidate in East Belfast," says David Ervine, who would be very happy to see PUP voters transferring to Sir Reg in the Westminster bout - as long as they remember to stick with him in the local poll.
He wonders though whether the PSNI money-laundering investigation and the high-profile searching of the home and offices of UUP Assembly member Michael Copeland will damage Empey, even though Sir Reg is not part of that investigation.
"I smell dirty tricks here, I really do, and I believe the target ultimately is Empey. At the very least, the police could have handled this more sensitively," he says.
But that's enough of a soft sell for Sir Reg from Ervine. Of more pressing concern for him is his political future and that of his party.
To maintain a political platform, Ervine and some of his colleagues must be returned in the local elections.
The PUP is fielding 13 candidates and hoping to hold at least its four council seats, three in Belfast and one in Castlereagh. It won't be easy. The PUP's other high-profile candidate, Billy Hutchinson, has a tough battle to retain his Belfast City Council seat in the Oldpark north of the city.
It's a long way from the exhilarating, heady days of October 1994 when Ervine and Hutchinson, with the likes of Gusty Spence, Gary McMichael and David Adams, played a crucial part in persuading the UVF and UDA to declare a ceasefire. The PUP flourished for a while, while the UDA's political wing, the Ulster Democratic Party, gradually imploded.
It's tight going now for the PUP but Ervine is categoric that his party still has a vital and positive role to play.
"We are democratisers," he says. By that he means the party can exert a positive influence over the UVF.
It hasn't always been successful, he admits, but adds: "Hundreds and hundreds of lives have been saved because of the loyalist ceasefire. Nobody can take that away from us. And you must remember that there has been no death in Northern Ireland by bomb or bullet since the turn of the year. And they say people like me have been a failure!"
Nobody can gainsay that argument but the trouble for the PUP is that ordinary unionists don't show any gratitude.
Ervine predicts that the IRA will disarm and enter into "a new mode" and that under pressure from George Bush, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern the DUP and UUP will be compelled to start talking to Sinn Féin again.
As for loyalist paramilitarism, he believes it has reached a double fork in the road and that it will travel three ways.
"There will be those who'll think the war is over and who'll go away. There'll be those who are prepared to try and make their communities work.
"And there'll be those who'll act as if patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, and that's the group I worry about," says Ervine.
