This is a powerful reminder of the limits to the power of modern unionism, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
The continuing crisis of unionism is laid bare in an important new biography of David Trimble.
Its title, Himself Alone, pays tribute to a sometimes solitary, self-sufficient Trimble leadership which grew disconnected from the unionist majority in Northern Ireland, with possibly fatal consequences for the Ulster Unionist Party. And it is tribute to the man himself that he should have co-operated with this biographer - Daily Telegraph leader writer Dean Godson - despite Mr Godson's hostility to the Belfast Agreement and the entire peace process.
The full trauma for unionists triggered by Mr Trimble's decision to join that process and enter government with Sinn Féin is here, in extraordinary detail. More than five years' dedicated research is reflected in a scholarly 841 pages of text alone.
Inevitably, not least given the author's own views, there is much to tickle Mr Trimble's detractors. Mr Godson's incredulity is palpable in his treatment of what he considers a complete UUP botch of the negotiations around the appointment of Mr Chris Patten's international commission and its reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Elsewhere, too, Mr Trimble may cringe at reminders of occasions when he was deemed to have under-played his hand or totally lost the run of himself in negotiations with Mr Tony Blair.
Yet the objective reader, mindful of Mr Blair's "big picture", will be less preoccupied with the detail of the interminable negotiation, and conclude with a deeper sense of the risks Mr Trimble ran for peace.
For this is a powerful reminder of the limits to the power of modern unionism, and of Mr Trimble's reduced room for manoeuvre after the failure of his predecessor Mr James Molyneaux (and the Rev Ian Paisley) to prevent the formal role for Dublin in Northern Ireland affairs institutionalised in the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.
The old David Trimble could have stayed on Portadown's Garvaghy Road and completed unionism's march to isolation. But two years after assuming the UUP leadership he found himself confronting a powerful new British leader with an unassailable Commons majority, comprising many Labour MPs who instinctively considered sectarian and unreconstructed unionism at least a contributory cause of 'the Troubles.'
Facing the same powerful pressure from the Republic and the United States as Mr John Major before him, and liberated by the second IRA ceasefire, Mr Blair resolved to bring the republicans in from the cold. Mr Trimble was the first unionist leader to have to deal with the fact that 'No' was an answer his prime minister would not countenance.
Remarkably, not only did Mr Trimble engage, he won a controlling influence at critical times, while winning Mr Blair's regard and respect in the process. Himself Alone also documents the famous (if overlooked) Trimble victories, most notably in the reassertion of British sovereignty and first suspension of the Stormont Assembly, and in Mr Blair's decision to twice postpone last year's elections.
Herein lies the story of Mr Trimble's eventual defeat, as well as instruction for the ascendant DUP. For Mr Godson confirms that Mr Blair had already bowed to republican pressure and promised Sinn Féin the election would proceed before Mr Trimble embarked on his final, failed negotiation with Mr Gerry Adams.
Many unionists fear there are always two processes at play in Northern Ireland: "one involving all the parties, and another between the British government and the IRA". Often, certainly, Mr Trimble would attempt to define a "single-issue agenda" only to rediscover that peacemaking was a two-way street and that the pendulum always swung back.
Fresh from a second election victory, the DUP is currently sheltering behind Mr Blair's tough rhetoric on the need for "acts of completion." But Mr Trimble was finally undone when he could no longer hold Mr Blair to his (Blair's) previously set mark for those acts of completion, and by what one senior civil servant describes as the prime minister's "utter lack of embarrassment over inconsistency". When the pendulum next swings, it will be towards Dr Paisley.