Election diary: Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor, detects muted SDLP support for the beleaguered UUP leader
Séamus Mallon and David Trimble didn't get on. When they ministered up at Stormont they housed themselves in offices as physically far apart from each other as they possibly could.
Trimble, because of his volatile nature, probably got most of the blame for their mutual aversion but Mallon could be curmudgeonly difficult, too. Theirs wasn't a political marriage made in heaven. Yet they had their moments: the best remembered probably when the two of them arrived in Poyntzpass, Co Armagh, in March 1998 to pay their condolences to the families of Philip Allen, a Protestant, and Damien Trainor, a Catholic, gunned down by the LVF.
It was a powerful symbolic action, the message obvious, a statement that if a Protestant and Catholic could be best friends then nationalist and unionist politicians had a duty to work together for the betterment of Northern society.
Now Mallon is retired while Trimble is struggling to save his seat and his party from political oblivion. Mallon turned up at SDLP headquarters earlier in the week to deliver something of a political leavetaking.
He seemed to offer a coded endorsement for Upper Bann nationalists to support Trimble. "We have a very excellent (SDLP) candidate in Upper Bann in Dolores Kelly," said Mallon, but then added, "I have no doubt that there will be people in Upper Bann who will make their judgments as they see the best way of using their vote."
Mallon couldn't personally go against Kelly but the latter portion of his statement hinted that nationalists might perhaps vote tactically for Trimble against the DUP's David Simpson, who is favourite to unseat the UUP leader. But galvanising moderate Catholics for Trimble would need a stronger exhortation than the muted message offered by Mallon.
The more pressing reason for Mallon's press conference was to deliver a rallying cry for nationalists to stick with the SDLP.
Over the course of this election the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP have been warning that the DUP and Sinn Féin in absolute ascendancy would lead to a more polarised, sectarian society. This is a big question for the DUP and Sinn Féin to answer and one that would have generated rows in the keynote media debates involving the main party protagonists.
But, so far, that hasn't happened. As Mallon complained, while huge issues are at play this has been a surprisingly "bland" election. Mallon, though, in his press conference resurrected his old bite and bile to try to wind up his enemies.
Referring to Sinn Féin and the IRA, he said: "If you take politics which is based on violence, the threat of violence, the vacillation about violence, the half-truths, the Stalinist approach within communities, holding communities to ransom - if you take that then you are dealing with a very dangerous thing."
As for what he saw as the punctured promise of the ceasefires of 1994 and the Belfast Agreement: "Remember the vision, the idealism that we all thought was going to come. Agh! broken legs, kneecaps broken off, fellows getting their throats cuts, young fellows being held to ransom every day of the week."
As for the DUP, "You have also those who led people waving gun licences, who invaded Clontibret, who were at the heart of Harryville, and were at the heart of Drumcree, and at the heart of every sectarian confrontation, who may now well be the largest party in Northern Ireland."
And so on for about 30 minutes without notes and without interruption, as he thundered about Sinn Féin and the DUP creating a "Balkanised" state, which "would make us half people politically".
He fulfilled his function, which was to annoy the hell out of Sinn Féin and the DUP, judging by their angry responses to his highly charged, articulate rant.
For half an hour Mallon, the old theatrical, political hand, injected some life and energy into a dull campaign.