The voters of North Down are a contrary bunch, always prepared to buck the trend of unionist politics. For years, while other unionists voted for the DUP or UUP, the good people of Bangor sent Jim Kilfedder, of the laughably titled Popular Unionist Party, to represent them in the House of Commons.
After his death, another one man band took over in the constituency, Bob McCartney's United Kingdom Unionist Party. Now, once again, the MP for North Down can hold meetings of her parliamentary party in a phone box. Lady Sylvia Hermon is the last woman standing, the only remainig UUP MP. The electoral earthquake which toppled her four colleagues was not as strongly felt on the Gold Coast. Only there, in the richest, the most English of constituencies, could the Ulster Unionists cling on.
But, with the greatest respect to the people of Cultra, their MP is the representative of an irrelevant political party. The Ulster Unionists, who dominated the first fifty years of Northern Ireland (NI), who as recently as five years ago, had ten MPs; are history.
It will be a slow death though. The party will go on winning assembly and council seats for years to come. But, in terms of being a big player in NI, its days are over. Some members will defect to the DUP, others will keep going with Alliance style doggedness, many will simply drift away from activism altogether, becoming politically homeless.
There are many reasons for the party's demise: unionist disillusionment with the Good Friday Agreement and the UUP's internal divisions are both major factors. But the shifting demography of NI is also important. It is rarely commented on but, as Protestants decline as a per centage of the North's population, there is a strong incentive for unionists to consolidate their diminishing power in a single political party. In North and South Belfast, in Fermanagh-South Tyrone, maybe even in East Derry and Upper Bann, unionists can no longer afford a plurality of options. Having established their supremacy, the DUP looks set to become the new unionist monolith.
Any obituary of the UUP must bear this in mind. Whatever one thinks of the Ulster Unionists, they have been replaced by something worse. They were no angels, but there were good people in the UUP, men (and at least one woman) who genuinely wanetd a better future for everyone in NI, people who weren't motivated by a visceral hatred of Catholics. I can not say the same about the DUP.
David McNarry, James Cooper, Demot Nesbitt, the McGimpsey brothers; these were decent men. There was, Ken Maginnis, the only senior unionist who can put his hand on his heart and say that he never uttered a word of encouragement to loyalist paramilitaries.
And then there was Trimble, a man one could admire but never like. I will not forget his actions at Drumcree in 1995, nor his disgraceful words after the murder of Ciaran Cummings. But I acknowledge that he took risks for peace, and he paid for this with his career. I respect him for making hard decisions, and for the toll which this took on him and his family.
But there were others in the UUP whose records were less laudable. There were the dour men, whose minds wre stuck in the 1930s of their youth: Willie Ross, Martin Smyth and James Molyneaux. There was John Taylor, whose inflammatory language in 1993 I will neither forgive nor forget. There were many rank and file members of the party who looked back with fondness to the Stormont days, when Ulster was "theirs".
No assessment of the UUP can overlook the fifty years when the party ran NI, when Catholics were discriminated agianst in housing and employment, when there was gerrymandeing and multiple voting. This posionous legacy led directly to the Troubles, the prolonged agony for both sets of people. The human cost of this was huge and the Ulster Unionists, for all they may insist that they never fired a shot, must take their share of the blame for the senseless waste of life.
From their decades of unchallenged dominance, party members developed a smugness, an assumption that they were born to rule, which they never truly shook off. For years, they took the votes of Protestants for granted. They raised the spectre of the republican menace and expected the people to troop off to the polling station and put an X next to the party's name. They promised the Protestant working-class that their lot would improve, but not before another sectarian head-count. Oh yes, there would be "jam tomorrow", or to use the Ulster vernacular "live oul horse and ye'll get grass".
The story of my great great uncle Bob is typical. For years he was a UUP alderman (no, not a mere councillor, an alderman) in Newtownards. In the 1960s he lost his seat to the Northern Ireland Labour Party, whose candidate actually had the temerity to campaign, to knock on doors and ask for votes. Poor old Bob had assumed that his party label and his membership of the local bourgoisie (he owned a chemist's in the town) would be enough to secure his seat in perpetuity.
There was something of that hubris in the UUP's crushing defeat on Thursday. One of the reasons that the DUP did so well is simply because they worked harder than the Ulster Unionists on the ground.
Some years ago, I stood outside the MBC in Queen's University canvassing for votes in a student election. Next to me that day was a member of the DUP. He moved with vigour, full of charm to potential voters, clearly loving what he was doing. Initially he asked people to support all the unionist candidates standing that day.
But, as the afternoon came, and no UUP canvassers turned up, he switched tack, merely asking people to support candidates from his party. Was this, I enquired cheekily, proof of a unionist split? "Well Barry", he replied in his gentle north coast brogue, "you reap what you sow". No prizes for guessing which unionist party did better in that particular election.
That hard-working young man and his party colleagues now reign supreme within unionism. For that reason, and no other, I take no pleasure in the demise of the UUP.