In 1995 Newton Emerson swore blind he'd never vote for David Trimble again. That was the summer he took charge at Drumcree, screaming his battle orders from the graveyard wall amid scenes of medieval chaos.
When the Garvaghy Road residents finally agreed to an Orange march, Trimble's subsequent victory jig hand-in-hand through Portadown with the Rev Ian Paisley ensured that no such compromise would ever be possible again.
But it ensured Trimble's surprise triumph at the Ulster Unionist Party leadership election two months later, when Orange Order backwoodsmen mocked media favourite Ken Maginnis and installed David in the top chair. But it was all a ploy. Trimble knew the leadership position was about to become vacant, knew Orangemen on the archaic Ulster Unionist Council would swing the vote and knew Drumcree's graveyard wall was the perfect campaign platform. His victory jig even outflanked the DUP - it's not every man who can score like that after just one dance.
Then Mr Trimble went back home to Lisburn to prepare for government while we, his Portadown constituents, spent the next eight years cleaning up the mess. Drumcree was the most expensive job interview in Irish history.
So it is difficult to sympathise with David Trimble's current predicament. Playing the hardliner to gain credibility for compromise is a tired old strategy that inevitably sows the seeds of its own destruction. It's not even a new trick to David Trimble, who entered politics in 1973 as an anti-Sunningdale Vanguard Unionist only to split that party five years later by advocating coalition with the SDLP.
This familiar sequence of initial extremism, pragmatic moderation and ultimate defeat by outraged party throwbacks is such a predictable process that mischievous republicans might call it dialectic - were they not just as prone to the phenomenon themselves. Who is Gerry Adams, after all, but Cathal Goulding for slow learners?
The next Stormont election will probably see this cycle start all over again with Sinn Féin and the DUP stumbling towards each other while looking over their shoulders. Eventually they will reach the stage the UUP and the SDLP are at now, but by then new extremists will have been provoked into challenging their leaders. Everyone, it seems, must reach the rotten core of Northern Ireland politics by first acting the maggot. Yet the sorry state of the UUP and the SDLP offers an opportunity to break out of this endless loop, for with little to lose, radical options can be seriously considered - and there is no more radical option than building consensus not inward from the extremes but outward from the centre. Whatever soon remains of the UUP should ask - or beg - the SDLP for an aggressively pro-agreement electoral pact. I will pause here for a moment while Northern readers have a good laugh. Then I'll remind them that tactical voting for the other side's moderates has been going on for years. Armagh unionists have voted for Seamus Mallon so often that many of them actually enjoy it, although not as much as West Belfast unionists enjoyed voting Gerry Adams out of office in 1992. Portadown nationalists probably didn't enjoy voting for David Trimble in 2001 but faced with an ascendant DUP they ticked the light-orange box regardless.
Admittedly there is a huge difference between such negative tactical voting and the positive tactical voting a centre-party pact would require - if asking nationalists to vote UUP to keep out the DUP is merely awkward then asking them to vote UUP to keep out Sinn Féin seems downright presumptuous. Yet such an arrangement would give nationalists an influence over unionist political conduct that no mere tribal victory could ever deliver.
Asking unionists to vote SDLP at the expense of the DUP is more straightforward in principle as the unionist electorate is already divided along pro- and anti-agreement lines. There will of course be loud and angry accusations of treachery from republicans and Paisley-worshippers alike, but then there always are. How much longer must such infantile insults drive the peace process before people realise that it's going around in circles?
A centre-party pact, or even, God forbid, a quiet understanding, would, however, be much more than an electoral strategy. It would energise debate, bring real issues into play, inspire the public and lure non-voters back to the polling booths, further diluting extremist tendencies. Such a pact would also provide a democratic outlet for the pro- and anti-agreement divisions steadily building throughout Northern Ireland, which the current sectarian political structure cannot contain - as entertainingly demonstrated by the implosion of the UUP. Most of all a pact might spare us from spending the next 10 years watching Peter Robinson, or worse still Jeffrey Donaldson, trudge down the same dead-end road that David Trimble has already walked twice-over to no permanent avail.