Trimble's career: Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern were doubtless saddened by the news of David Trimble's fall in Upper Bann. But will they also have felt even the slightest twinge of guilt?
There is little sentiment in the rough trade that is politics. Successful politicians make their own luck.
Trimble, for a long time, was luckier than he had a right to expect.
Defensive ministers and officials may also rationalise that the Ulster Unionists and SDLP - in the persons of Trimble and former deputy first minister Séamus Mallon - failed to make the most of their own opportunities in the heady, optimistic aftermath of the Good Friday accord.
That he "failed to sell" the Belfast Agreement was the charge frequently levelled at Trimble as he struggled through party crisis after crisis to maintain his pro-agreement majority.
The absurdity of that charge - and the price of his fidelity to the agreement, even after unionist consent for it had plainly been withdrawn - was laid bare last night to the cheers and jeers of a triumphant Democratic Unionist Party.
Yet as Mallon made clear in his powerful Westminster valedictory speech, neither he nor Trimble were ever masters in their own house.
And yesterday's results for the SDLP in Foyle and South Belfast cannot mask the collapse of the centre ground of politics in Northern Ireland.
True, with three seats in the new House of Commons, the SDLP is arguably no worse off than before. But few can doubt they are on borrowed time.
Senior figures in the DUP last week privately admitted they would happily see the SDLP take the Rev Martin Smyth's seat courtesy of the split unionist vote, provided they were second-placed to reclaim it next time. And the headline story of the nationalist/republican tussle remains Sinn Féin's growing ascendancy, despite the Northern Bank robbery, the murder of Robert McCartney and the string of Irish Government revelations and allegations about the continuing criminal and terrorist-related activities of the IRA.
Besides there is no "centre ground" to operate if Trimble's defeat, and the virtual wipe-out of his party, also spells the end of 100 years of Ulster Unionist history.
Lady Sylvia Hermon may soldier on, with the backing of a still-functioning Assembly Party and a core of local councillors.
However, the unionist electorate have themselves put the seal on the realignment within unionism first plotted by Peter Robinson and Jeffrey Donaldson, as reported in this newspaper, in the aftermath of the first assembly election in June 1998.
Taking his leave of the House of Commons, Séamus Mallon anticipated yesterday's collapse and that realignment.
And he put the responsibility firmly at the door of Blair and Ahern.
Through a process of "side deals" with the hard men, Mallon declared, the two governments had produced the "template" for the collapse of the centre ground.
The charge resonated with what remained of Trimble's loyalist circle. For in their view Trimble was undone by two things in particular.
First, by the Irish-led pressure which saw Blair reverse his earlier decision and agree to fresh assembly elections in November 2003 without a prior political agreement enabling the appointment of a new executive and the resumption of power-sharing devolution.
More fundamentally still, they saw the UUP leader undone by his inability to hold Blair to his own declared standard for paramilitary "acts of completion".
In this election campaign Trimble by all accounts fought a decent campaign, telling the unionist electorate that he had nonetheless imposed his own conditions on the republican movement - allowing them the opportunity to complete the transition to democracy - then forcing the suspension of the Stormont assembly when he deemed them in a state of non-compliance.
However, the unionist electorate had stopped listening to Trimble long before Mr Blair set the date for the final showdown.
Indeed they were even less inclined to do so having seen London, Dublin and Washington go further for the Rev Ian Paisley than they ever had for Trimble, at least in terms of last December's pressure on the republican leadership to allow a photographic record of IRA decommissioning.
That Trimble survived to this point is truly remarkable. The Rev William McCrea triumphantly reclaimed South Antrim yesterday. It is sobering to recall that he first won that seat as evidence of the rising tide of anti-agreement unionist sentiment in the autumn of 2000.
A year later Trimble effectively lost his majority mandate at Stormont, and found himself forced to rely on Alliance and Women's Coalition Assembly members redesignating themselves "unionist" for the day in order to secure his re-election as first minister.
This writer's suspicion at the time, reflected in these pages, was that that particular manoeuvre would return to haunt Trimble.
His defence was that it was justified because two of his defecting colleagues had renounced the UUP mandate on which they had been elected.
It will seem an obscure matter now but it surely at least reinforces the sense of Trimble's fidelity to the agreement.
That his party now lies broken in that cause will still fail to impress the begrudgers who maintain he could and should have done more.
But fair-minded people throughout these islands and beyond will readily accept that he did more than any other unionist politician to lay the basis for a credible and sustainable peace in Northern Ireland.
Time and again, on issues like the reform of the RUC - a raw nerve that ran through his community - Trimble showed himself a peculiarly non-political politician, prepared at critical moments to put the peace process before matters of party advantage or calculation. He was entitled last night, in a graceful and dignified speech, to claim that Northern Ireland - for all the uncertainties that lie ahead - is a better place than when he was first elected to Westminster 15 years ago. And the ironies are manifold. Trimble was the hardliner who claimed part-ownership of the peace process to end the political isolation of unionism and secure the principle of consent for the North's constitutional position.
And even as they cheer his departure, and would only ever privately admit - he is the man who will have made it infinitely easier for Dr Paisley's DUP, if and when they choose to complete the deal.