IS THE IRA planning a political assassination between now and polling day? According to press and other reports, security chiefs in London fear so. In the pasta week protection has been stepped up discreetly around a number of Conservatives with past or present Northern Ireland associations.
While there appears to be no target-specific intelligence, the indications are that a number of republican activists have gone missing from their usual abodes. Those directly concerned are reticent about the information which has been imparted to them. Suffice to say they, like Scotland Yard, are taking the threat seriously.
Some well-placed observers say the threat may be the sum total of the IRA's intention. We must pray it is so. Common sense, indeed, suggests it must be so. A "political" murder would surely blast to bits any credibility still clinging to the avowed interest of republican leaders in reviving the peace process.
It would certainly destroy the rationale which the eternal optimists have offered for the massive campaign of disruption which the IRA has waged since the British general election campaign began.
The "benign" thesis suggests that the disruption policy - carrying maximum publicity value with minimum risk to public safety enables the republican leadership to pacify hardline activists while pursuing electoral gain on the promise of peaceful intent.
The attendant explanation is that many nationalists, as distinct from republicans, are relatively sanguine about a campaign which makes life uncomfortable for the British, so long as young children and elderly women aren't actually being killed on the streets.
One fancies many nationalists will in fact be deeply unhappy with the thought processes designed to give the republican leadership the benefit of almost any doubt. And even if the IRA does not have murder in mind, the rationalists should begin to question how this ongoing campaign of disruption and fear visited upon hundreds of thousands of people in London and elsewhere yesterday - is going to play out after May 1st.
Specifically they, and we, should ask what it tells us, either about the actual disposition of republican leaders, or alternatively about their authority and control over their movement. Certainly no one should imagine that putative ministers in a Blair government are incapable of framing those questions, or of divining a blatant contradiction between the proffered hand of peace and a continued willingness to inflict mass terror.
Even as the IRA brought London to a standstill yesterday, Sinn Fein leaders were at it again, talking up the prospects of doing serious business with a Labour government. Great significance, it seems, is still reposed in Dr Mo Mowlam's Easter Saturday message that Sinn Fein "could" be admitted to talks in early June (provided the IRA immediately restored the ceasefire, and observed it by word and deed in the meantime).
Opinion remains divided as to what, if anything, Dr Mowlam was doing on that occasion. Her account (accepted privately by some ministers and unionists) is that she simply gave a straight answer to a straight question, which she believed fell firmly within the confines of set policy.
Others believed, or chose to believe, differently. Certainly Senator Edward Kennedy found the message skewed as it crossed the Atlantic. But no matter now. Easter was a long time ago. After Aintree, Lab our chiefs foreclosed on that early option, when Mr Jack Straw said the Provisionals had put themselves "beyond the Pale" for inclusion in the short time between the election and the scheduled date for the resumption of the inter-party talks at Stormont.
There was a further incremental toughening-up of Labour's language last Friday, after IRA bomb threats caused massive disruption in the north-west of England and, for a time, closed the north-south travel link.
This time the stark warning came from Dr Mowlam. "There is no halfway house in a democracy," she declared. "Sinn Fein and the IRA must take the democratic path exclusively, and for good, or they risk being left outside forever."
The temptation may be to dismiss this as mere campaign rhetoric. Others may think Dr Mowlam anxious to cover an exposed flank. And while keeping the door firmly closed on Sinn Fein, she certainly does not mean to imply that she or Mr Blair would turn the key in the lock.
It is axiomatic that the door to democratic politics will always be open. However, the distinct hardening of the language seems to betoken growing irritation and incomprehension among the Labour leadership.
Labour sources say the ongoing IRA campaign is self-defeating, and bound to make Sinn Fein's inclusion harder still to achieve. One source was particularly dismissive yesterday about Sinn Fein suggestions that Labour might be more amenable to the Hume/Adams proposals rejected last autumn by Mr Major.
"That's them ratcheting up their demands," he said. "What they mean is they expect to come into talks which won't even address the decommissioning issue... They seem to think we'll be in the business of forcing the unionists, when that's less and less realistic."
Civil servants, intelligence and security chiefs will be lining up on the afternoon of May 2nd to tell a newly installed Secretary of State what they consider realistic. If it falls to Dr Mowlam, she will find herself operating in swiftly transformed circumstances.
Moreover, for all our fixation with the details on the ground in the North, a Blair appointee would be operating with one eye permanently cast on his domestic agenda and priorities.
John Prescott gave us the scale of these yesterday, when he spoke of Labour's desire for a second successive term.
During a first term, a Blair government would have to battle against a newly-nationalistic Conservative Party over Europe and Scotland. But Sinn Fein should note Mr Blair's obvious anxiety to preserve the bipartisan policy on the North. Republicans have bemoaned the limits it imposed on Labour's attitudes in opposition. They should assume no automatic benefit should it fail Mr Blair in government.