Sylvia Hermon is now the UUP's only MP, but does she want to lead the party? She talks to Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor
On the morning of the election count, Sylvia Hermon was enjoying the first spring-like day in weeks and clearing out her car. Removing posters and canvass leaflets and "binning the lot", she enjoyed a rare sense of freedom unknown to those who have never sought election.
"I was no longer an MP, as of April 11th when the [ House of] Commons was dissolved. And that morning, I was no longer a candidate either. The voting was over."
Boiling the kettle in her kitchen, she called her party leader, David Trimble. "He assured me things would be OK in his [ Upper Bann] constituency. He told me: 'I've heard the Sinn Féin tally results in Upper Bann and they're never wrong'."
Throughout the four-week campaign, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) had been relentlessly optimistic in the face of dire predictions of a Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) conquest of Ulster Unionist Party seats.
Hermon delayed heading to her own count until after lunch, still convinced that the forecasts of UUP doom by bookies and pundits were exaggerated. Her party leader would survive. There would be enough good news to live off.
It was a slow count in her North Down constituency. There was no television and she heard only rumours from the other constituencies.
"I was cocooned. I'd no idea how I had fared." A relentless sender of text messages, she was frustrated that none had come back. "I just couldn't find out what was happening."
But then her local constituency colleagues began to drip-feed her the bad news. Roy Beggs, UUP deputy leader, had lost by a landslide in East Antrim, routed by the DUP's Sammy Wilson. The SDLP had pulled off the surprise result of the election with Alasdair McDonnell's defeat of both his unionist challengers. In South Antrim, the UUP's David Burnside lost decisively to the DUP's Rev Willie McCrea. Then came the blow, delivered by Assembly colleague Alan McFarland. "DT [David Trimble] has gone".
Her mobile rang. It was Steven King, Trimble's political adviser, to express his utter disbelief. "He just can't have gone," King said, incredulous. Then, as she freely admits, "reality kicked in".
"I'm the last one standing," she told herself as she lined up for her own declaration. Standing near DUP challenger Peter Weir, a one-time law student of hers at Queen's University and former member of her local unionist association, she had "no inkling about my majority", but found it to be surprisingly high, at almost 5,000 votes.
She was now the sole MP from a party (in its centenary year), which had once basked in unfettered power. It seemed unbelievable that it should come to this. But she celebrated her victory, thanking her constituency workers and resolutely refusing to observe a wake in respect of the political corpses littering her party.
Doing her own thing now comes easily to Sylvia Hermon. Independence was forced upon her as a young child following the early death of her mother.
The second of four girls, she lived frugally on a 50-acre farm in Tyrone and was raised by her father, Robert Paisley, who instilled good Presbyterian values of "doing the right thing", the need for education, self-reliance and service to the community.
Bigotry was neither voiced nor tolerated. Their politics were not of the flag-waving variety. The young Paisleys reckoned that stepping out of line would warrant the firm-but-fair discipline of the newly posted local RUC sergeant Jack Hermon.
SOME 20 YEARS later Sylvia Paisley met the stern sergeant again. She was shocked at how the "funny, generous, romantic and thoughtful man" differed from his TV persona - the RUC chief constable who held the line against the IRA. "I had judged this man by his TV appearances and I didn't like him much," she laughs. Within 13 months she married him.
Last year they returned to the same church in Donaghadee, Co Down, for the funeral of the minister who officiated at their wedding 17 years ago. However Jack Hermon, 28 years her senior and now suffering from Alzheimer's disease, told his wife he couldn't remember being there before.
It was one of the very rare moments, she says, which prompted her to tears.
The experience of a do-everything father who cooked and cleaned as well as farmed, helped form her disbelief at lingering sexism in Northern politics in general and within unionism in particular. She describes, with disappointment, how all-male delegations used to leave Trimble's Westminster office to pass by hers on their way for talks at Downing Street.
"Someone might pop their head in to promise they'd let me know later how they got on," she says with a shrug.
She refers to them as "the old guard" and privately despairs of a new leadership being formed from their number.
"Individually, there are some very fine," she pauses, ". . . men," she smiles. They have been there for a very, very long time. But the old guard has to read the writing that is large upon the wall. And that is, it is time to change. We cannot go on as we have been going. We have to give leadership."
For her, the only course to recovery is to assert her party's standing as a determined, credible, liberal and tolerant bulwark against Paisleyism. She is convinced thousands of unionists, persuaded to vote for the Belfast Agreement in 1998, have stayed at home ever since - ignored by the UUP.
On the first day of the new parliamentary term in the Commons this week, DUP leader Ian Paisley and his eight colleagues pointedly took the bench which was once occupied by Trimble and his team. It is seen as a shunning of Hermon, but she says she is used to that from the DUP.
Her liberalism means she has many friends in other parties - and she denies that the Commons will be a lonely place for her now.
"My outlook is different from DT's, I've a more open approach to Labour members and to Europe than he did. No, I won't be alone."
Shortly after her election in 2001, she invited Mark Durkan - then the newly elected leader of the SDLP - to address her North Down Unionist Association. This was followed by a visit to a Fianna Fáil cumann meeting in Dublin. There is nothing to indicate that these were the last meetings of their type.
She dismisses as political suicide all talk of UUP postponing the choice of a new leader, and appears distinctly cool about talk of interim leaders, or collective leaderships drawn from the top table of Ulster unionism. It all adds up to jumping into the grave, in her view.
THE LOGIC OF her argument - that the next leader should be different, young, radical, liberal and untainted by any predecessor - is that she should get the job. But does she want it? The pause says much. "That's such a difficult question," she confesses to her teacup.
"I have a very strong Presbyterian streak of duty within me," she laughs at her own character trait, "and a sense of service to one's community and one's neighbour. I am not going to leave my husband without support in his hour of need. I am not going to let him down," she says sadly.
Suddenly she picks up: "Though, he is the one who continues to support me and encourage me and to say 'go for it!'. But I don't want to lose sight of the boys growing up and lose more time with them." Yet these are the same boys - Robert (15) and Thomas (13) - who just four weeks previously had urged her to go on one more leaflet drop, one more poster run.
Judging by her own anecdotal evidence, Hermon's absentee-parent guilt appears not to be matched by the family she is clearly devoted to. Perhaps much will depend on her husband's widowed sister, Belle, who lives beside the Hermons and provides much care when Sylvia is not there.
Not yet 50, Sylvia Hermon looks to the coming parliamentary term with enthusiasm. She clearly loves the Commons and her constituency work. She is passionate about what her party must definitely not do as it squares up to its post-Trimble dilemma. Should it turn to her - the last one standing?