Over the past few months it's become clear that the DUP won’t take Gerry Kelly and Sinn Fein won't take Jeffrey Donaldson as Justice Minister. This has led to the crazy notion that the Alliance should do it, and utterly predictably they seem amenable to the idea. So much for their principled stand against the "sectarian consensus" (sic)

Liam Clarke in his column on Sunday suggested that this was the "missing piece of the jigsaw" and that the Alliance are the potential answer to a tricky question for the chuckle coalition.

Alliance is a creature so useful that if it didn't exist it would have to be invented. In some ways the party, which is linked to the Progressive Democrats in the republic and the Liberal Democrats in Britain, acts as Northern Ireland's conscience - a coalition of reasonable, middle-of-the-road folk united around an agenda which is liberal, pragmatic and non-sectarian.

It is just me suspects he write this specifically to get name checked on Alliance election literature next time out? This sort of gushing praise doesn't really add anything to the argument. After all, he is simply dressing up a party that stands for nothing more than "we're not them and, we're awfully nice". That isn't an ideology or an agenda; its political activism built on nothing more than middle class snobbery and intellectual cop-out.

Alliance have spent their time in local government, not as Clarke states ensuring power sharing, but selling their pretence of principles for office. I suppose it's only surprising it took them this long to sell themselves for ministerial office. They call themselves an opposition, yet we are now apparently seriously considering taking an executive with 97 of the 108 Assembly members represented, and making that 104. We need LESS of the legislature tied up in the programme for government, not more! The power sharing arrangements were designed to be short to medium term, SF and the DUP spent a little too long trying to fight their way out of their Belfast Agreement boxes, but now that they've accepted them the timer is going again. Progress towards normailising the governmental arrangements here will only be hindered by putting the Alliance into Justice just for the sake of spiting the UUP and SDLP. Look at the figure again, 104 out of 108 MLAs. And when one adds the rest of the Alliance's quasi technical group, it leaves only Dawn Purvis outside the Executive loop.

If the Alliance want ministerial office so badly, give it to them. But if it happens, my Party and the SDLP shouldn't be there. We would have moved from an involuntary coalition, to a voluntary one with Alliance's admittance to the Executive, which is a fundamental change to the situation. Critically for the UUP and SDLP though, the situation with a five party Executive would be utterly untenable, a bizarre elective dictatorship where the wranglings over legislation would take place behind closed doors in the Executive, with the Assembly as a rubber stamping body. Sound famaliar? It should.