`So, David Trimble has turned out to be a hero?" The question was put to me, with just the faintest hint of irony, by a South African friend in London earlier this week.
This man, who is now in his 70s, spent most of his life fighting apartheid. Much of that time was spent in exile in Europe, though he now lives once again in his own country. I had been asking him how the situation seemed in South Africa. We hear such gloom-filled predictions for the country's future since Nelson Mandela's retirement.
The reports concentrate on the rise in violent crime, a loss of confidence in the Afrikaner community, and the disillusion felt by very many black people that not enough has changed since the first free elections in April 1994.
Did he share this sense of disappointment and these fears? I asked.
"No, no," he cried. "Of course, we face terrible problems. It is a long process changing a whole society. But the country is full of hope. We have escaped the past and there is no going back to it."
I began to feel that I had heard this somewhere before. Then I realised that it echoed, uncannily, what I had been saying to English friends who had been asking me, in sepulchral tones, if there was any hope for the future of the peace process in Northern Ireland.
So often, because of the nature of the news media, the story told is one of gloom and deep depression. The summer which has just passed is an example.
We have heard much of the threats to peace: the murder of Charles Bennett by the Provisional IRA, the furious reaction of many unionists to the Patten report on policing, the defection of John Taylor to the anti-agreement camp. And so on.
There has been very little, by comparison, about David Trimble's efforts, in the face of continuing onslaughts from embittered old men and ambitious younger ones, to hold his party together.
I haven't read much about the brilliant poster campaign organised by the Irish Congress of Trades Unions, the Confederation of British Industry and the Northern Ireland Council for Civil Liberties. Under the slogan "Don't be a Chicken - Do the Deal" it urges the political leaders to take courage in their hands.
We know that the situation is particularly difficult just now. George Mitchell, who usually exudes an air of smiling confidence, has told us that the Belfast Agreement could fail.
Such a warning from this source has to be taken seriously, even if its main purpose is to concentrate the minds of all the parties involved as the review process goes into its most crucial week.
First things first. This weekend David Trimble has, once again, to try to rally his party at the Ulster Unionist conference in Enniskillen. It is likely to be a highly-charged gathering at which most issues will be used to attack the Belfast Agreement and, by extension, David Trimble's leadership. Last year's debate on the RUC was dedicated to "our forgotten victims" and the mood on this occasion, post-Patten, is likely to be even more emotional.
The Ulster Unionist leader has made it clear that he intends not only to defend the Belfast Agreement but to lay out in detail why it represents the best hopes for the future of the broad unionist community. While agreeing that the review process is under stress, Mr Trimble has declared roundly: "I note the eagerness with which some people try to write finis to this operation. I haven't done that yet and I am not thinking in those terms."
This new toughness in Trimble's approach was in evidence last weekend when he spelt out the political realities facing the unionist community to a conference of his party's youth wing. There was, he said, no possibility of a return to the "immobilism" of the past. Political progress, post-agreement, could only be achieved by creating structures to which all parties, including Sinn Fein, could give their allegiance. If unionism was seen to destroy the agreement it would be left totally isolated, shunned by all shades of political opinion in the United Kingdom and, probably, in this State as well.
It was an electrifying speech, provoked in part by James Molyneaux's prophecies of doom made earlier in the day, and deserved much wider coverage than it got in the Irish and British media.
Peace process apparatchiks like myself are perhaps too much inclined to read the runes of other people's success and failure in the area of conflict resolution. Sometimes one can push the comparisons too far.
Forgive me, nonetheless, if I return to the South African experience. Over the summer I read a powerfully moving account of the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission over two years from l996. Country of My Skull is by Antjie Krog, an Afrikaner poet and journalist who covered the hearings of the Commission for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
It makes for harrowing reading, not only for the testimonies of the witnesses but for the painful honesty of Ms Krog's reactions to them. (It is also a humbling reminder of the scale of other people's problems in the task of laying the past to rest, and the fact that this process has to continue long after the political structures are put in place.)
At one point the author praises F.W. de Klerk for his courage in taking the decision to embrace fundamental change in South Africa, but qualifies her tribute by criticising his failure to convince members of his own community that such change was not only necessary, but represented the only possible way forward for them. This omission, she argues, left many Afrikaners bewildered, angry and fearful for the future.
This is exactly the challenge which faces David Trimble this weekend. The evidence of recent weeks, in particular his speech to the young unionists last weekend, underlines his own intellectual and emotional commitment to making the Belfast Agreement work.
If he can be faulted, it is that he has failed to convince his own community that the accord offers them their best hope for a peaceful and secure future. His party conference this weekend will provide a platform for him to speak not only to his own members, but to tell the broad unionist community that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.
PS: In response to the question which started off this column: I replied that, yes, David Trimble had turned out to be a hero, but that the greatest test of his courage will be seen in the coming weeks.