There were more losers than winners in the peace process yesterday. Mr David Trimble won his arm-wrestle with the British Prime Minister but may discover there is a price to be paid for such victories.
He blocked Sinn Fein entering government but at the expense of becoming a prisoner of his own right wing. He achieved a united party but on a basis of implicit rejection of the Belfast Agreement. He delighted his most bitter opponents in the unionist camp and dismayed those who thought he could move towards his self-proclaimed goal of a pluralist parliament for a pluralist people.
But if there were pluses and minuses for the UUP leader, it seemed largely negative for Mr Tony Blair. He certainly deserved full marks for trying but there must be doubts over the political wisdom of throwing every concession within his power at David Trimble when he was going to be spurned in the end. What happened to the fabled British intelligence network? Mr Blair may have expended much of his credibility with the nationalist and republican side in a doomed crusade to save David Trimble from the rejectionists.
Looked at in a certain light, Sinn Fein might seem like clear winners. The argument that the whole decommissioning issue was a unionist smokescreen for atavistic opposition to powersharing with "the other side" could now get a much wider hearing.
But the Ides of July was not a good day for the Sinn Fein leadership who now face more questioning and criticism from sceptical republicans along the lines of: "You made concessions to the unionists and they threw them back in your face; you put your faith in the British and they let you down."
The main winner was the No camp in unionism; to retain his leadership, Mr Trimble was forced to sing from their hymnsheet. It goes against the logic of signing the agreement but the harsh reality of Northern Ireland politics is that if you sign something, you have to sell it.
It is too early to say the rejectionist unionists have scored a permanent victory: Mr Trimble has not disavowed the entire process, nor has he walked away from the table. But whatever trust he enjoyed among nationalists has largely evaporated and will be very difficult to restore.
The biggest loser was the SDLP. This, after all, has been John Hume's game-plan for at least a quarter of a century. Out of many bitter and disappointing days for the SDLP leader, yesterday must have been among the worst. The strain was visible but his quest for peace will continue and, like Sisyphus, he will roll the stone back up the hill no matter how many times it rolls down.
It was a bitter day too for Mr Seamus Mallon although he may have emerged with more credit than most. It is not every day a politician quits a £62,556-a-year position on a point of principle. In a sense he seized the initiative from the First Minister, winning the last of so many arguments between them. The demand was growing last evening for Mr Trimble to take the "honourable course" also.
Sadness was the main emotion around Stormont among those who believed the future of the two communities depended on the historic compromise of Good Friday 1998. There was a smell of political death about the place: staff worried about their jobs and visitors crowded into the gift-shop to buy souvenirs as though collecting pieces of the Berlin Wall.
Even reporters who had waited outside Glengall Street for Mr Trimble's announcement found it a slight shock to come into the Assembly chamber and find the UUP benches deserted. The majority party on one side of the community had adopted an abstentionist tactic while, in the topsy-turvy scheme of things, Irish republicans were being nominated to become ministers of the Crown.
As the somewhat farcical events unfolded inside the chamber, there was concern at the conclusions that other, less parliamentary elements might be drawing on the outside. The loyalist pipebombers and arsonists would presumably decide that their campaign to undermine the agreement was succeeding. Extreme republican groups could even now be drawing up plans for a renewed campaign.
There is no more fragile plant than democracy in Northern Ireland. These events were the equivalent of a sharp frost from which it will be most difficult to recover. In any normal society a 71 per cent approval for a new political dispensation would see the people's will being implemented with haste. But since the end of May last year there has been the equivalent of a creeping constitutional coup which scored its greatest triumph in the rain at Glengall Street yesterday.
There have been other bad days in the efforts to resolve this 30-year conflict. There was Margaret Thatcher's "out, out, out" rejection of the Forum Report but that led in a relatively short time to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The "binning" of the Mitchell Report by John Major heralded the end of the first IRA ceasefire.
There were black days in the multi-party talks at Stormont when it seemed no progress would be made. This process is nothing if not resilient and the peacemakers will pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again.
What may sustain them is the thought that there is only one piece of the jigsaw that remains to be put in place. On the hopeful side, there is no immediate danger to the IRA ceasefire, the bedrock of the process. The gradual politicisation of the republican movement seems set to continue and there has been no sabre-rattling so far from that quarter.
On the unionist side there is still a hard core of pragmatic individuals who know the "war" is over and that a good deal is there to be made. The thought of a return to the horrors of violence on this small patch of earth may yet bring a restoration of sanity all round.