David Ervine
Since the loyalist ceasefire, David Ervine has been the darling of the media, the North's Catholic middle-class, and Southern politicians. He has built a reputation as an enlightened unionist, willing to do business with nationalists.
His Progressive Unionist Party, the UVF's political wing, embraced the peace process while the UUP dragged its heels and the DUP howled "treachery".
Yet this week, Ervine abandoned the usually positive tone. The PUP, he warned, would withdraw from the Stormont talks in the new year if the "endless flow of concessions" to republicans did not stop.
He complained about Dublin's decision to grant early release to nine IRA prisoners. He asked for a meeting with the Government and pledged that the discussions would be much "less polite" than before. Still, his admirers have not deserted him.
"Davy is coming under pressure from elements within the UVF," says a fellow unionist. An SDLP figure says: "We're not writing David Ervine off. He is vital to the peace process." Ervine emerged from the shadows of the loyalism in late 1994 after the IRA and loyalist ceasefires - he played a vital role in securing the latter. Previously, he had offered behind-the-scenes political analysis to the loyalist paramilitaries but was not happy to face the cameras until the ceasefire. He soon became loyalism's most articulate spokesman. He was no dour, bowler-hatted unionist. He smoked a pipe, liked a pint of Guinness and Irish stew, and cracked jokes. Although Ervine is flexible, however, he is staunchly opposed to a united Ireland and the loyalist ceasefire is conditional on the Union's safety.
But unlike other unionists, he isn't hostile to the press. He has mastered the art of presenting the unionist cause in a rational, attractive way.
He has urged his community to divorce politics from religion and articulate a modern, anti-sectarian unionism "free from the Pope, the Queen and King Billy".
Ervine was elected to Belfast City Council in June. He has built the PUP from nothing. Its support for the peace process has won it praise in republican areas and even some votes from Catholic professionals.
David Ervine was born in east Belfast in 1953, the youngest of five children. His mother worked in a pram factory. His father was an iron turner in the shipyard and a navy officer in the second World War.
His father was a member of the old Northern Ireland Labour Party and sympathetic to civil rights. He was an avid reader and would attend debates in Clonard Monastery on the Falls.
Ervine left school when he was 14 and held a series of manual jobs. He married Jeanette, who lived nearby, when he was 18 and joined the UVF the next year, feeling his community was under threat.
Two years later, he was stopped in a car with a bomb. He served five years in the Maze prison where he met and was influenced by UVF commander Gusty Spence.
His favourite book is The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressell. He named his second son after one of its characters. He learnt enough Irish in jail to shout `About Turn!' in Irish through the wire, reducing republican ranks to chaos. He insists he has never hated Catholics, arguing that loyalist violence is a response to IRA violence.
On release from jail in 1980, Ervine set himself up as a newsagent and milkman but remained active in loyalist politics. He was high on the IRA's death list. He had to give up his business and move home three times because of the danger to his life. Nowadays, most hostility towards him comes from within his community. The DUP and the Loyalist Volunteer Force - which broke away from the UVF over the ceasefire - loathe him.
Pamphlets have been circulated and graffiti erected accusing him of being an MI5 agent. Ervine says envy and resentment motivate such suggestions.
He has won new friends within the UUP but is not as popular with republicans as his party colleague, community worker Billy Hutchinson. "Billy is a more genuine person," says one. "Ervine's a bit artificial. His pipe, his pious words, and the twee stories about his upbringing, make him seem like a manufactured personality." A unionist councillor complains of "St David who never tires of hearing his own voice."
Regardless of these criticisms, Ervine has played a pivotal role in the peace process. His willingness to sit down with Sinn Fein has allowed the Ulster Unionists to enter talks without being written off as traitors.
His objections to the direction of recent political developments will act as a warning to both governments that they can't take him for granted. But few observers believe that, having come this far, David Ervine will walk away from the process for good.