Just over 24 years ago David Trimble was helping bring down Brian Faulkner's power-sharing Sunningdale government. Just over three years ago, red-haired and flame-tempered, he was, to use his new friend Seamus Mallon's phrase, ballyragging police officers at Drumcree.

Five months ago, he was signing up to the Belfast Agreement and talking about creating a pluralist parliament for a pluralist people. The funny old world of politics, as Margaret Thatcher has said. But then again, when one examines the career of Trimble one comes up against a mess of contradictions.

And now he is a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Whatever next for David Trimble? There's a poser.

John Hume, his fellow Nobel laureate, has fought most of his political battles. Trimble's main battles are just beginning, not least within his own party. A story John Hume's wife, Pat, recounts may strengthen David Trimble's resolve, as he faces into a fraught period ahead, irrespective of his having captured the world's most prestigious accolade.

She recalled: "I met Brian Faulkner not long after the collapse of the power-sharing Sunningdale government of 1974. And he said to me, `Pat, it was the best five months of my life, and the best day was the day John and I opened the Northern Ireland Office in Brussels. I declared the office open in English, and John did the honours in Irish and French. That to me was an expression of my Britishness, John's Irishness, and our Europeanness'. "

Trimble may not like being reminded of Sunningdale for that government collapsed after only five months, and with it the political career of the then prime minister, Mr Faulkner. Another reason is that Trimble, as a member of William Craig's Vanguard movement, was one of the hardline unionists who agitated to destroy Sunningdale.

More than 24 years later Trimble is filling the role the unfortunate Mr Faulkner briefly held. Seamus Mallon has famously described the Belfast Agreement as Sunningdale for slow learners, and the point Pat Hume was making was that Trimble could be facing into the time of his life - that if he has the political courage and acumen the Assembly will survive far longer than the five months of Sunningdale.

David Trimble slept through the Nobel Peace Prize announcement in a hotel in Denver yesterday morning. His wife, Daphne, hearing the news at home on BBC Radio Ulster, decided not to ring and disturb him at 4 a.m. Colorado time. "Rest well, David," his supporters will have silently urged, "you'll need all the sleep you can get to strengthen you for the perilous weeks and months ahead."

With the Assembly elected, the Belfast Agreement falling into place, and now the Nobel Prize in his grasp, Mr Hume can beat a gradual retreat from politics, if he so wishes. For the Ulster Unionist Party leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland there is no such relaxing prospect.

Next weekend he will face friend and foe alike at the UUP annual conference. There will be those like Ken Maginnis, Reg Empey, and Dermot Nesbitt standing solidly with him. There will be others like Jeffrey Donaldson, William Thompson, and William Ross, standing behind just waiting to unsheath metaphorical daggers, should he opt for a middle way on the decommissioning issue.

The question now is, can Trimble save the Belfast Agreement by overcoming his enemies within and without the party, and will this highest international prize help him? Faulkner moved unsuccessfully from being a hardliner to a moderate. Can Trimble successfully do the same?

The short answer is that the peace prize will surely strengthen his position, but that ultimately it is down Mr Trimble's nerve and character whether he can lay the ghost of Faulkner to rest. Everything's possible in the new political dispensation.

Trimble has come a long way since he campaigned against Faulkner. In fact, he's come a long way since at the first Drumcree in 1995 he rounded on police officers and danced the triumphalist jig of victory with Ian Paisley through the streets of Portadown. Any bets then he would be Oslo-bound three years later?

As said, Trimble can be complex and paradoxical. His journey to the Nobel Prize has involved many changes of face and attitude along the way. In the three years since the first Drumcree he has shown great political courage. He entered into the talks under constant pressure from the likes of Ian Paisley and Robert McCartney. Many within the ranks of the UUP plotted against him.

He persevered at the talks, and at the most crucial period - Good Friday this year - held his nerve, even when a previous ally, Jeffrey Donaldson, was walking out on him, and at a time when the majority of his Westminster colleagues had abandoned him.

Having come through almost 30 years of politics he knew risks had to be taken, and how far he could go. In the end, his political antennae were sharp: the Belfast Agreement was passed by 71 per cent, with unionists more or less evenly divided. That was a good political call: here was an agreement that the overall community embraced, and his own unionist community could just about wear.

It was the political experience he gained in hard times through the 1970s and 1980s that prepared him for the most arduous of political tasks ahead in this decade. The paradox in Trimble's nature goes back to the 1970s when, while prominent in the rightwing Vanguard movement, he could yet support a volte-face by Vanguard's leader, William Craig, and endorse his call for a "voluntary coalition" with the SDLP.

That met with a predictable reaction from unionism. Ian Paisley and other leading unionists and loyalists denounced him. That was the end of Vanguard, and possibly of Trimble's political career, but a few years afterwards he slipped back into the fold of the Ulster Unionist Party.

A qualified barrister during this period, he earned his crust as a lecturer in the law faculty of Queen's from 1968 to 1977, and senior lecturer from 1977 to 1990. His friend, the historian and commentator, Ruth Dudley Edwards, tells of how one of his Queen's students ended up being interned as a republican in the early 1970s, yet how Trimble nonetheless travelled to the Maze on a weekly basis to give him tutorials.

At the time of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 Trimble, complaining that unionist opposition to the accord wasn't sufficiently vehement, joined the Ulster Clubs. He said he had no objection in principle to "mobilisation and citizens' army calls", and added: "I would personally draw the line at terrorism and serious violence. But if we are talking about a campaign that involves demonstrations and so on, then a certain element of violence may be inescapable."

He took over the Upper Bann Westminster seat in 1990, succeeding the late Harold McCusker. Five years later he was at the centre of the Drumcree dispute. Shortly after, when Lord Molyneaux finally resigned as UUP leader, Trimble, to the surprise of other contenders such as John Taylor and Ken Maginnis, became party leader.

His uncompromising stance at Drumcree is reckoned to have swung the necessary extreme right-wing UUP votes to get him elected. The London Times described Trimble as a moderate at the time, prompting a British government minister to expostulate, "I was having my breakfast when I read that; nearly puked up my Frosties."

His election caused dismay in British and Irish government circles yet Trimble again surprised by entering into the Stormont talks of 1996, and sticking with them, even when Sinn Fein was brought into the negotiations. There were times when his short fuse and nervous energy caused anxiety, but he nonetheless had the tenacity to remain committed to the peace process, even in the worst of times.

He is a committed Orangeman, but when the Order refused to call off its Drumcree protest after the death of the Quinn brothers in Ballymoney he said the Portadown brethren had lost their way.

His biggest test may come shortly. The only way around the decommissioning issue seems to be some sort of fudge. His enemies in the UUP - especially those conniving against him in factions such as Union First - are threatening to challenge his leadership if he endorses a compromise on disarmament.

The question now is whether Trimble can accept some middle way on the decommissioning question to allow Sinn Fein into an executive. To do so will mean confronting his opponents in the UUP, principally the likes of Mr Donaldson and Mr William Ross. He has managed to overcome many seemingly impossible challenges in recent years, and whether he can surmount this one the months ahead will tell.

In recent years Trimble has learned to relax more. His second wife, Daphne, a solicitor whom he lectured at Queen's, has helped to soften him somewhat. She agrees that he can be painfully shy, and rather blunt. "But he's getting better, mind you he could hardly fail to," she told Ms Dudley Edwards.

It fits with his image that his favourite composer is the stentorian Wagner, but he also enjoys Strauss and Verdi, not to mention Elvis Presley. Like John Major he is a fan of Trollope, and likes the poetry and Kipling and John Hewitt.

Mr Trimble is not a touchy-feely politician. He rather stiffly shook hands with Mo Mowlam at the recent British Labour Party conference, unlike Tony Blair and Seamus Mallon who unselfconsciously embraced her in bear hugs. It's not his style. He will find some of the publicity surrounding his honour excruciating. As Daphne Trimble said yesterday, "David does not relish the limelight".

Still, this Nobel Prize should bring it home to his party that the world reckons he has done a very good job in helping cement the peace here. That may not impress the more fixed of his opponents but waverers may side with his allies and decide to continue to allow him lead, as he sees fit.

One commentator yesterday rather rudely queried whether Trimble was a "Johnny come lately" to the business of peace. But he deserves his honour. He has done what other unionist leaders failed to do in the past: move outside his constituency, and then bring that constituency, or sufficient of it, with him.

As Brid Rodgers of the SDLP said yesterday: "He is the first leader of unionism in my experience who has been prepared to take risks and acknowledge the need for equal recognition of unionism and nationalism."