The Northern Ireland Assembly is not a place for people of principle, says the anti-agreement Ulster Unionist, Ms Pauline Armitage. It is where those who don't have strong personalities or convictions flourish, she claims.
Since her election three years ago, Ms Armitage has been a thorn in her party leader's side.
"I shouldn't really be at Stormont," she says. "I slipped through the net. David Trimble wanted a bunch of yes-men in the Assembly and he got me.
"I was useful to them when they needed a hand in the air for a vote. After the hand came down, they thought I could be discarded. But I will not be used like that."
The big question is whether Ms Armitage will raise her hand in support of Mr Trimble when he faces re-election as First Minister in tomorrow's crucial vote.
She won't make a final decision until then.
She says there are too many unanswered questions on decommissioning and she wants a timetable for further disarmament.
She has other reasons to oppose returning to government with Sinn FΘin.
She believes the "Britishness" of Northern Ireland is being steadily eroded and is concerned about policing and legal reforms.
She firmly supports the Orange Order's right to march.
She stresses it is Mr Trimble's policies, and not him personally, she dislikes. Ms Armitage, who has two grown-up daughters, lives in the pretty seaside village of Portstewart, Co Derry. A petite woman, she has beaten breast cancer twice.
Her father died when she was young, leaving her mother to rear 10 children.
Her mother brought her to UUP meetings. She was always interested in politics. At school when friends chatted about boys and dances, she pondered the latest by-election result. She joined the Young Unionists in 1969.
A brother was in the B-Specials, and Ms Armitage served in the Ulster Defence Regiment. She has been a local councillor for 17 years and was twice mayor of Coleraine. The baby-wear shop she ran with her husband was destroyed when the IRA bombed the town in 1992.
While not "a whingeing, whiney woman", she claims she has been treated very badly by her party at Stormont.
"I was pushed into the background because I opposed the agreement. They wanted a quiet little woman who would do what she was told, and I wasn't one of those."
She says she was denied the opportunity to give media interviews.
"When they insisted press releases had to be cleared in advance, I resigned the party whip."
Many Assembly members toe the party line in order to secure an easy life, she says.
"There are people in all the parties who disagree with decisions their leaders make, but they think of their salaries, their mortgages and their social lives and they go along with it."
Ostracised by many UUP colleagues at Stormont, she feels lonely. "I have no soul-mate," she says.
She sits on the Health Committee and, while she wouldn't have coffee with the Minister, Ms Bairbre de Br·n, "I always treat her with respect at meetings, as she treats me".
Ms Armitage isn't shy about speaking her mind.
When asked if concreting over Provisional IRA arms dumps would satisfy her, she jokes that it would be enough if Mr Bertie Ahern and Mr Brian Cowen were underneath.
She admires Baroness Thatcher. "She was very black and white, and that's a good thing. She signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which I opposed, but she did take on the hunger-strikers and let them die."
Ms Armitage knows voting against Mr Trimble tomorrow could lead to expulsion from her party.
"For 33 years I have knocked doors during elections, put up posters and driven people to polling stations. I have never lost an election I contested.
"But if the leadership decide it is to the benefit of the UUP to remove me, then I will just have to go," she says.