If the Northern Ireland peace process is to be rescued, then it is Patten who may well prove to be its saviour. The Mitchell review gets under way in a political climate that has been debilitated by lack of momentum on the Good Friday agreement.
This immobility has been largely due to a huge increase in the perceived importance of issues such as IRA prison releases, the dispensing of paramilitary "justice" and (above all) the non-decommissioning of IRA weapons. It is in relation to these difficulties that the Patten report on the RUC has the potential to make a crucial contribution.
Let us assume unionism is seriously concerned about both IRA non-decommissioning and paramilitary punishment attacks, and truly committed to the Good Friday agreement.
If this is the case, then the reform of the RUC should be a central political goal, and not only because it is something to which all the signatories of the agreement have already signed up. It is in the interests of all those who want to push the process further.
Republican justifications for the retention of illegal arms and the savage pseudo-justice dispensed by the IRA in nationalist areas are, at this stage in the peace process, largely rooted in a profound mistrust in the organisation of policing in the North.
Whatever about its objective justification, this mistrust is not the preserve of a tiny, desperate few: it is clearly felt across the nationalist community. If it is not addressed in the Patten review, it will continue to underpin community support for the kind of paramilitary actions that are at present making further progress on the Good Friday agreement impossible. And, in the absence of substantial policing reform of the type promised in the agreement, the obstacle of decommissioning is likely to remain as insurmountable as ever.
It is hard to understand, therefore, why well-meaning unionism, and particularly those most vehement in their condemnation of punishment attacks, should be so hostile to RUC reform. The British government has given strong assurances that individual officers will be treated well by the state.
It cannot be, surely, that the name of an organisation, or its badge or other regalia, matter more than the service's ability to do what is required of it? The RUC is itself the result of a name change, and the forces in Britain have been frequently amalgamated, changed and superseded. No British force describes itself as "Royal", yet this hardly undermines their loyal commitment to their force and the law.
It is part and parcel of normal government that institutions are reformed. The Metropolitan Police has recently reached a low ebb, with proposals for its whole-scale reform, even abolition, being widely ventilated in the aftermath of the Lawrence report: Londoners have responded by engaging in reflective debate, not by marching on the streets to protect "our police".
As to the nature of any such reform, it would be meaningless if it did not provide for the "new beginning" to which all the Good Friday signatories signed up, with the clear goal set out of achieving "a police service capable of attracting and sustaining support from the community as a whole".
The Patten report will not be a bolt from the blue; it will be a further step in a policy of reform already agreed in principle by, among others, Mr Trimble and his party colleagues.
It should be remembered that one of the main purposes of the commission was to give unionism time to acquaint its wider community with the implications of a reform to which its leadership had committed itself; it is a measure of how backward recent movement has been that this should now seem an extraordinary idea. But the energetic participatory work of the Patten Commission during the course of its inquiries may prove to have an important impact in this regard.
Widely respected though it is and always has been, the unionist veto is surely not a roving negative, capable of being resurrected retrospectively to destroy selected parts of a previously agreed overall package. And if the new policing structure necessarily involves formerly unsavoury elements in responsible positions, then so be it; politics is at its toughest but most responsible and impressive when it connects principle to everyday reality.
A new Northern Ireland police service of the type anticipated in the agreement, likely to appear in Patten and analysed in a recent study by John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary*, will preserve all that was best in the old force while spreading its traditional strengths - respect for the rule of law, accountability, discipline, personal integrity - into zones of the province where banditry and justice have up to now been barely distinguishable.
The prize for success on this front will be the establishment of confidence not only in the police but in the courts and the criminal justice system as a whole. Jury trials will be able to return. There will be an end to punishment attacks and an almost unstoppable momentum in the direction of voluntary, paramilitary decommissioning is bound to be generated.
All of these advances could happen quickly and would in turn make the ongoing release of paramilitary prisoners much easier for public opinion (and, it should be remembered, for those who order such releases) to stomach.
If Patten works in this way, the various reasons for inactivity on the Good Friday agreement will have been stripped away. The Mitchell review might be the occasion for "jumping together" but it will have been Patten who will have lowered the bar to a scaleable height.
To those genuinely concerned about these issues but committed to the agreement, the prize Patten offers is therefore one that must be grasped. But to those for whom all this summer's obstacles are just the latest in a series of contrived hurdles to prevent the execution of an agreement from which they now wish to resile (or at very least to renegotiate on more favourable terms for their "side"), Patten represents a dangerous clarification that must at all costs be undermined.
If this is now the prevailing unionist position, then both Patten and Mitchell will merely be fresh platforms for renewed bouts of righteous intransigence. The governments may then need to consider fresh structures which preserve the successful elements of the Good Friday agreement while deepening British-Irish relations in a series of new ways.
But there is nothing wrong with the Good Friday agreement that a speedy and effective response to the Patten report will not repair, and repair quickly. In itself it is both a review and a renewal of last year's breakthroughs. It should also be allowed to signal their resurrection.
Conor Gearty is Professor of Human Rights Law, King's College London. He is co-author of The Struggle for Civil Liberties. Political Freedom and the Rule of Law in Britain, 1914-45 to be published shortly by Oxford University Press
*Policing Northern Ireland. Proposals for a New Start (The Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1999)