THE Anglo Irish picture remains about as confused as ever following last night's dramatic Commons vote on the Scott report. Mr John Major scraped home by just one vote.
The nine Ulster Unionist Party MPs - as indicated in yesterday's Irish Times - pitched in their lot with the Opposition. But last minute assurances contained the threatened Tory rebellion.
As the dust settled, word filtered out of angry exchanges between Mr David Trimble and British government ministers. The UUP leader insisted he had not been in the deal making business. Government sources, suggested otherwise. Ministers, it was said, were not prepared for "a clandestine deal" over the voting system for any elections to be held in the North as part of an attempt to revive the peace process.
One Irish source in London had been cheerfully predicting that Mr Trimble would be unwise to overplay his hand. On last night's evidence, it seems the UUP leader's bluff has been called. And, for a while at least, that was enough to have some Irish eyes smiling.
But here's the rub. Two Tory MPs, Mr Richard Shepherd and Mr Quentin Davies, joined last week's defector Mr Peter Thurnham in voting against the government. That was enough to leave Mr Major two votes short. It was the abstaining Democratic Unionist Party trio which made up the difference.
It might be a bit premature to suggest that Mr Major and the DUP leader, Dr Ian Paisley, have established an alternative "parliamentary understanding". But Dr Paisley's evident content with the unfolding game plan will surely give nationalists and republicans pause for thought.
Mr Trimble gamely insisted last night the UUP had judged the Scott report on its merits - striking a blow for parliamentary democracy and ministerial accountability. And, in fairness to the UUP leader, he found himself where he had always wanted to be voting against the government.
But his colleagues had not been like minded and the certainty is that the shift in their position reflects the party's unease about the price Mr Major may feel he has to pay if elections are to take place.
In simple terms, the UUP fears a DUP SDLP convergence in favour of holding a party plebiscite, with the North serving as a single constituency and the parties drawing putative negotiators from party lists. The UUP thinks this would reproduce the conditions of the North's European elections, in which Dr Paisley and the SDLP leader Mr John Hume vie for pole position.
Their hostility to such an arrangement is not difficult to understand. In Westminster elections, the DUP averages around 13 per cent of the vote (and around 16 per cent in the district council polls). But this rockets in the European contest - courtesy of Dr Paisley's personal pulling power - to 30 per cent plus.
The UUP's central charge, therefore, is that elections under the system favoured by the DUP (and, it suspects, Mr Hume) would distort the electoral reality in the North and leave the "largest" party in third place.
Mr Trimble, it might be argued, underestimates himself. But that is his position. His support for the principle of an "elective process" alongside his antipathy to the form of election which seems to be emerging is not the only complication facing Mr Major and the Taoiseach, Mr Bruton.
For, if there is an emerging consensus between Dr Paisley and Mr Hume on the form an election might take, there is absolutely no agreement between them on what would or should happen thereafter. Mr Peter Robinson, the DUP's deputy leader, has certainly made it clear it will not, be negotiating directly with Sinn Fein under any circumstances.
That takes us to the core problem to which British and Irish officials will return in the Cabinet Office in Whitehall later this morning. While Mr Trimble was having his reportedly bad tempered conversation with Mr Major last night, Mr Paddy Teahon and Sir Robin Butler were busy, only a short walk away, poring over draft communiques for the hoped for summit meeting between Mr Major and Mr Bruton.
Sources close to the negotiations last night said "the gap" between the British and Irish positions remained. But they declined to confirm that the sticking point - is the refusal of the British government to define an electoral process which provides the immediate ante chamber to all party negotiations without further preconditions.
Senior Dublin sources say the Taoiseach is unlikely to buy into a communique which translates into nothing more than another declaration of "the firm aim" of both governments. But informed sources here think Mr Major unlikely to be able to offer much else - for the precise reason that the British government (never mind the unionists) has preconditions which it cannot but press following the resumption of the IRA's bombing campaign.
Much has been made of the fact that, Mr Major - when responding to the Mitchell report - offered elections as an alternative to his Washington 3 decommissioning demand. But it is often overlooked that the prime minister has repeatedly said Sinn Fein can only join a negotiating process if it signs up to the Mitchell report's suggestion for "parallel decommissioning".
If tomorrow's Anglo Irish summit goes ahead, it may quickly become clear if the Irish Government considers that a precondition, Meanwhile, we may be sure Mr Trimble will feel no obligation to help Sir Patrick Mayhew ease the barely concealed anxieties on the Tory backbenches. Mr Major may reflect that last night's was but one vote along the rocky path to a general election, which he still hopes to avoid until 1997.