Since he first won his Fermanagh-South Tyrone seat in 1983 Mr Ken Maginnis's unique brand of outspoken moderation has won him friends and enemies in equal measure on both sides of the Border.
Mr Maginnis has been one of his party leader's most faithful lieutenants since the signing of the Belfast Agreement. In this role he has become one of the most controversial figures in the deeply divided UUP, pouring scorn on any who dare to question Mr Trimble's policies.
At the most recent UUP conference he outraged many on the party's anti-agreement wing by saying "some people need people to die so they can lament".
A passionate defender of the agreement, he said yesterday that many had not done enough for it after voting Yes in 1998.
"One of the things I resented was that people came out in their hundreds of thousands to vote Yes at the referendum and then they sat back and thought that they had done their bit for God and Ulster . . . and they really hadn't," he said.
Mr Maginnis was always solidly on the party's progressive wing. In an Irish Times interview in 1992 he revealed he would like to learn Irish, and never referred to Derry as Londonderry.
Throughout his career Mr Maginnis has been one of the best-known unionists south of the Border where he became a regular speaker at summer schools and university debates on the North.
In 1997 it was Mr Maginnis who took part in the first major televised debate between Ulster Unionists and Sinn Fein when he went head to head with Mr Martin McGuinness on the BBC's Newsnight programme.
Mr Maginnis's high-profile and past career as an officer in the part-time Ulster Defence Regiment meant he was no stranger to threats on his life. Numerous attempts to kill him were foiled, and the Irish Times interviewer described him as living "behind a high wooden stockade outside Dungannon".
As his party's security spokesman he has consistently supported the British army and RUC. He complimented them for successful operations and defended them in the face of criticism, even calling for an end to an outside inquiry into collusion between RUC officers and loyalists on the grounds that it was sapping morale. He has also been outspoken in his opposition to the RUC's name change.
From the 1992 Brooke-Mayhew talks onwards, Mr Maginnis was strong in insisting that any settlement must be accompanied by the handing over of paramilitary weapons.
Although anti-agreement unionists would accuse both him and his party of rowing back on their commitments in this regard, within the UUP he was seen as dogmatic. A party colleague said of him in 1999: "I think Ken rather has a fetish about the guns issue."
Notwithstanding his apparent moderation, Mr Maginnis has been unable to avoid the headlines. In 1998 he removed a number of Tricolours from a Westminster canteen on St Patrick's Day and threw them into the Thames. Only a month before he had publicly called the Northern Secretary, Ms Mo Mowlam, "a damned liar".
In 1987 he served a very short prison sentence for failing to pay his car tax in protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
Although he is a diabetic and has been on crutches in recent months, Mr Maginnis said he would not be standing down for health reasons. "The body may need a bit of work but the engine's still good," he said.