You write off David Trimble at your peril, writes Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor
He won a "Triple Crown" of sorts himself on Saturday. Mr Trimble dismissed the challenges against him, changed the party rules to centralise its power structures, and placed his allies in key officerships.
His remaining wish of the day was to slip off somewhere and see the rugby. It is not known if he achieved this "Grand Slam".
Of his victories, he insists the second - concerning constitutional reform - is the most important. But there can be no doubt that the headline of the morning in question was not that he secured his desired constitutional overhaul, but the fact that he commanded nearly 60 per cent of the UUC's vote after a vexed series of close encounters in recent years.
Mr Robert Oliver and Mr David Hoey ended the day as they had begun it, as relative unknowns - even within the party.
However, Mr Trimble surely knows that that triumph was aided significantly by the failure of those orchestrating the challenge to present a credible challenger. Indeed, the heave often smacked of desperation. Mr Hoey announced he was nothing more than a stalking horse who would, if elected, step aside.
Neither challenger exudes much of the kind of stuff of which party leaders are made. Yet they combined to secure 40 per cent of party support. In any other party, such a vote usually means that if the leader's end is not nigh - it soon will be.
Mr Burnside, Mr Trimble's most obvious and eloquent senior opponent, has already ruled himself out of contention on the grounds of his self-declared arrogance. For others favouring a lower-key challenge, it was a bad day and it showed.
Mr Fred Cobain, who said before Saturday he would neither back nor vote against his leader, was visible - but only just.
Sir Reg Empey, once Mr Trimble's high-profile right-hand man and a senior party officer, appeared to have opted for discretion and an early exit.
But for all that, the fundamentals of the UUP split remain. The party remains diminished at Westminster where one MP, Mr Jeffrey Donaldson, has defected; two others, Mr David Burnside and Rev Martin Smyth, oppose both leader and policy; and two of the other three - including Mr Trimble himself - face stiff challenges at the next election.
At Stormont, the party is nine seats adrift of the DUP which is baying for more UUP blood at the next council elections.
Mr Trimble firmly believes in himself and in his style of leadership and direction. He insists, with some self-righteousness, that the DUP is moving onto UUP policy territory, and forecasts that his great political odyssey in search of a stable and peaceful Northern Ireland secure within the UK will be seen to a successful conclusion.
But at what cost? So far it has been immense. One hefty item on the bill appears to be the party's sense of reality.
It continues to assert it is a "broad church" and representative of a swathe of Northern Ireland. Yet one glance at the hundreds of elderly as they negotiated the stairs from the meeting hall gives a contradictory perspective.
Perhaps what is most obvious of all - and in this regard the party most resembles the SDLP -the voters will return when some public common sense is restored.
For all his significant triumphs at the weekend, Mr Trimble still appears to talk like a First Minister.
But the cold fact is that he heads only the third-largest party vote for anyone other than him.