Unionists in 1974 saw the Conservative Party's loss of Enoch Powell as Northern Ireland's gain. After the convulsions of that year's first election and the Ulster Workers' Council strike, the collective unionist leadership of Harry West, William Craig and the Rev Ian Paisley turned to the former Tory MP as a man capable of commanding national and international attention for, and understanding of, the unionist case.
Just eight months after his resignation from Edward Heath's Conservative Party, Enoch Powell was returned as the MP for South Down under the banner of the United Ulster Unionist Coalition. He held the seat, courtesy of a divided nationalist vote, until 1987.
To the amazement of many observers, Powell worked well as a member of the unionist "team", although the break-up of the coalition would later see him lead outspoken attacks on the DUP as he gained influence within the Ulster Unionist Party. That in part derived naturally from his experience of Westminster and hiscommand of the Commons.
However the crucial element was Powell's close and ultra-loyal relationship with James Molyneaux, then UUP leader: their shared love of Westminster and their mutual aversion to devolution as necessarily an anti-unionist device.
Powell and Molyneaux led a ferocious battle against James Prior's rolling devolution proposals which led to the creation of the 1982 Assembly, and saw unionism's salvation in integrationist measures - reform of Westminster procedures and only minimal local-government style devolution. They were buttressed by Mrs Thatcher's 1979 manifesto commitment to create one or more Regional Councils in the North; by her own antipathy to devolution for Scotland; and her evident reliance on Powell's mastery of economics during the first troubled years of her administration. However unionist critics later complained that too much had been made of this when, to the bitter disappointment and, it seemed, surprise of both men, Thatcher signed the 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement.
Despite his misgivings about the protest strategy, Powell resigned and re-fought his seat in protest against the Agreement. However he was subsequently highly critical of the spectacle of colleagues going to prison as part of a civil disobedience campaign, urging unionists to continue simply to say no - confident in the belief that the Agreement would eventually collapse "under the weight of its inherent contradictions."
Mr Eddie McGrady of the SDLP, who won the South Down seat from Mr Powell in 1987, said yesterday he was "one of the last of the great parliamentarians whosaw the supremacy of the House of Commons as above all things, and was an expert in its theory and in its practice".