David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s first minister from 1998 to 2002 and leader of the Ulster Unionist party from 1995 to 2005, has died aged 77. In 1998, Ruth Dudley Edwards wrote about the Unionist leader from a Catholic’s perspective.

On a wall in David Trimble’s Westminster office is a cartoon of a bunker, complete with tin-hatted soldiers poking their rifles over the sandbags.