Constituency profile/East Derry: DUP and UUP candidates are vying to be the most outspoken in their opposition to a deal with Sinn Féin, writes Dan Keenan.
Canvassing in Coleraine, Gregory Campbell is so relaxed he feels he can afford a joke at the expense of leading Ulster Unionist David Burnside. Arriving in Burnside Park, the DUP MP for East Derry quips: "We'll have to rename that Former MP Park," laughing at his own one-liner.
He won this solidly unionist seat from UUP stalwart Willie Ross in 2001. Although his majority is a relatively slim 1,900, the DUP feels there is little to threaten its grip on the seat. Door-step evidence seems to support this, even allowing for Ulster politeness to politicians who arrive at the front door unannounced.
For Campbell the mood change within the unionist electorate is palpable. "The template has shifted," he says. "I remember canvassing in this town shortly after I announced I was going to fight the seat in 2001. After a few doors I thought I might have made a terrible mistake."
". . .This time, I deliberately began canvassing in the same area. The difference is amazing." The "difference" is the change in attitude towards the party to which the area was once loyal, and to the Belfast Agreement.
"These people feel they have been sold a pup and they will not be conned again. They will not be duped twice," he explains.
"People voted for the agreement [ in the referendum] because they thought they were voting for the IRA to go away."
He signs up to the theory that it is the unionist voter who gave the agreement his support, and the benefit of the doubt, who is now most opposed to it.
Caught up in that backlash is the UUP and David Trimble in particular. Independent, anti-agreement unionists are not contesting the seat, which Campbell says clears the way for the DUP.
The Ulster Unionists warn that the electorate must not leave the stage to the "extremes" of the DUP and Sinn Féin.
David Trimble has asked the public to "vote for those building a decent society". Locally, UUP candidate and Assembly member David McClarty attacks Campbell on his parliamentary record, portraying himself as the hardest-working constituency representative.
A popular man around Coleraine, he promises "full-time representation", a dig at Campbell's membership of both the Assembly and the Commons. "I have made a promise to resign my Assembly seat if elected to Westminster, making me a full-time MP," he vows.
He says there is no such thing as the pro- or anti-agreement divide among unionism any more.
"The DUP would have done a deal with Sinn Féin last December were it not for a grubby photograph. And we are not going into an executive with Sinn Féin while the IRA is still around."
He claims "complacent Campbell" has the worst record of all unionist MPs at Westminster, and believes that nationalist voters may vote tactically for the UUP to keep the DUP man out.
As if working in a parallel universe, the SDLP's John Dallat knocks on the doors in Foreglen, a nationalist hamlet just off the Derry-Belfast road.
A handful of neat houses bordering an immaculate Gaelic football pitch, this could be one of more than a dozen such villages nestled among the unknown scenery. It seems as if all available flat land around these parts is owned and mowed by the GAA.
Like the UUP, Dallat questions the "template shift" in unionist allegiances, believing that the DUP is talking up the mood swing. His SDLP team believes nationalists have lost patience with Sinn Féin over the IRA's activities. Dallat denies it's a "Robert McCartney factor". Rather, the trend was already established before the Northern Bank robbery and the McCartney murder were blamed on republicans. "McCartney just gave that mood a focus," he says.
His party is still recovering from the defection of Billy Leonard to Sinn Féin. He was Dallat's election agent at the Assembly election in November 2003 and quit the party for Sinn Féin a few weeks later, claiming that the SDLP lacked direction.
Leonard claims Sinn Féin's "all-Ireland party and all-Ireland vision" is what brought him into its ranks.
"We're fighting not two but three elections here," he claims. "The council elections, the Westminster election and the next election." The two parties are fighting their own battle for supremacy in a constituency neither of them can win.
In 2001 the SDLP beat Sinn Féin by some 2,000 votes, but in the Assembly election - fought on a PR basis - the two republican candidates won some 700 more first preferences than the two SDLP men.
If any contest between the two parties can illustrate the wider tussle between them, this constituency can. The bronze medal awarded for third place in East Derry will tell us much.