Trimble resignation: Analysis He retained his fidelity to the agreement and his trust in the better instincts of people on both sides in the North, writes Frank Millar
In the final analysis it was hubris that did for him. Yet David Trimble didn't see the end coming quickly on Friday as the unionist electorate toppled him and decimated his party with a show of force which seems to have been intentionally brutal.
Maybe in the dark hours of the nightwatch, long after the polls had closed on Thursday, he privately entertained his first doubts. But if he did, the soon to be former Ulster Unionist leader told them to no one else.
There will certainly have been a shudder of apprehension as he travelled to meet his tormentors at the Upper Bann count - though in the end the DUP elected for a display of contempt over the roughhouse to which they had subjected Trimble and his wife, Daphne, in 2001.
Daphne too, it seems, had little idea what lay in store. For as Trimble travelled through his constituency on Thursday he thought to divine something strange and encouraging at play.
Long before Tony Blair named the day, and even after, Trimble had battled to establish some sort of understanding with SDLP leader Mark Durkan by which they might defend whatever remained of "the centre ground" of Northern politics.
He apparently extended that effort to Alliance leader David Ford, and found himself rejected by both. Bizarrely, Ford proceeded in the campaign to rubbish the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP. Did he imagine the collapse of both would finally deliver the miracle that had eluded Alliance since its inception? Whatever Ford's calculation, the anecdotal evidence is that he certainly succeeded in persuading some moderate voters to strike his candidates off their cross-community voting list for the council elections on the same day. One complaint was that the UUP had moved to the right of the DUP in a desperate scramble for votes.
The reality was that - to the delight of DUP strategists, and the dismay of some of his few close surviving supporters - Trimble had declined to do just that by abandoning his commitment to power-sharing devolution in favour of what the DUP managed to promise could be an alternative form of democratised direct rule.
And, of course, even before Trimble opened his dialogue with Durkan, the SDLP leadership had calculated that its best defence against Sinn Féin lay in a further greening of the agenda, up to and including talk about the processes that might lead to a united Ireland.
Thus, even as Trimble clung to his notion of a coalition of the centre, the DUP's Peter Robinson was able to ridicule him for suggesting that unionists should be advised to vote SDLP to defeat Sinn Féin in constituencies like Foyle and South Down where neither the DUP or UUP could themselves hope to win.
Interestingly, and in defiance of their ethnic stereotype, there is evidence that a significant number of Protestant voters did vote tactically in Derry where, in fairness, Durkan also managed to bring out John Hume's old vote. By contrast, in Upper Bann it seems there was no strong disposition among Catholic voters to try to rescue Trimble. Yet, even on the day, Trimble himself was counting on it.
He had been disappointed by Durkan but hugely encouraged by the intervention of Séamus Mallon. Where no others in the collective nationalist leadership seemingly dared go, the former deputy first minister had raised himself majestically to try and inject a note of moral urgency into the decision-making process of nationalist voters. Some senior party figures in turn tried discreetly to convert this into SDLP votes for Trimble.
However, they told The Irish Times on Wednesday that they believed Trimble was still headed for defeat and that the scale of any such tactical voting was unlikely to make the difference.
As the first votes were being cast, however, Trimble himself would not have recognised that assessment. To the contrary, he was predicting both a unionist response, and SDLP tactical voting of an order that would see him spring a surprise. In fairness he also allowed that he might be deluding himself.
This writer could not decide between delusion and fantasy on hearing subsequent UUP suggestions that four of their five seats could be retained, and that they also had a chance against the DUP's Gregory Campbell in East Londonderry.
News of the UUP's miscalculation will bring further glee to the triumphant DUP, and readers will find it hard to credit. Trimble's friends might comfort themselves with the fact that at least he retained to the last his fidelity to the Belfast Agreement, and his trust in what he regarded as the better instincts of people on both sides in Northern Ireland.
However, the UUP's failure of basic political intelligence was breathtaking. And if the buck rightly stopped at Trimble's door, what remains of his party might conclude that responsibility is borne too by a number of those also rejected on Thursday who will now offer themselves as leadership candidates.
Their collective failure will doubtless inform a commentary which shows a party increasingly detached from its electorate; from the moment of signing the agreement and the negotiating failure to make IRA decommissioning an absolute requirement of Sinn Féin's entry to government, through the release of terrorist prisoners and the reform of the RUC, which undoubtedly cost them dear.
Yet the historical record suggests something else. Certainly it can be argued that Trimble and the UUP could have survived all the messy compromises and botched negotiations made in the course of their attempt to secure the peace process.
The DUP's convergence last year on much the same political terrain can also be cited as evidence of Trimble's success - much greater than some nationalist detractors will ever give him credit for - in winning the argument for compromise and accommodation and thus fundamentally changing the North's political landscape.
No, this political death was more sudden than slow and wholly predictable. For it should be remembered that despite his failures over decommissioning and the prisoners and policing controversies, David Trimble was still topping the poll in Upper Bann in the Assembly elections of November 2003. And it was just shortly before that that hubris set in.
By his own account, Trimble's greatest mistake came in September of that year. When I asked him last summer if he had been too accommodating to Blair after his decision to allow the twice-postponed assembly election, he replied with remarkable candour: "Unfortunately the truth is worse, it's more a case of hubris, that we saw Blair and Ahern fail in March and we were tempted into thinking maybe we could do it better ourselves."
Trimble at the time was being urged to put party first, embrace hardliners Jeffrey Donaldson and David Burnside and fight any election (which Blair had secretly promised Sinn Féin would proceed) on a "no" ticket.
This was far from crazy advice, since it was Trimble after all who had forced the suspension of the power-sharing executive. And it was his refusal to do so which set the stage for the Donaldson defection to the DUP which, as we can now see, marked the point of no return for the man, and possibly his party.
Far from failing to "sell" the Belfast Agreement, Trimble finally fell because he tried once too often to save it.