David Trimble: The Price of Peace

Trimble won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in securing the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998. And he and his Ulster Unionist Party paid the price in the 2005 general election by way of a shattering defeat inflicted by the Rev Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists. The Trimble story might have been left there, the loss of his leadership, his elevation to the House of Lords and his decision to join the Conservatives a mere postscript to this work originally published in late 2004. Yet the history-making didn't stop there, and the subsequent reinvention and transformation of Dr Paisley as a power-sharing leader requires us to revisit Trimble the better to understand the sensational advance in Northern Ireland politics in the intervening period.