LIKE many of his colleagues in the fringe loyalist parties, John White wears a suit well. He has neither the avuncular ease of ii David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party or the youthful dynamis of his Ulster Democratic Party colleague, Gary McMichael but he moves comfortably in the environment of the Stormont talks, looking something like the owner of a small chain of supermarkets.
He has a serious manner but he carries none of the menace that he must have done 23 years ago when, in the words of former SDLP leader, Gerry Fitt, he "murdered my best friend in a very cold blooded, brutal and sadistic way".
That friend was SDLP Senator Paddy Wilson, badly beaten and stabbed 32 times at a quarry in north Belfast in June 1973. He died alongside 29 year old Irene Andrews, a Protestant friend and one time Northern Ireland representative on BBC's Come Dancing programme. She was stabbed 19 times. White was convicted of both murders.
Lord Fitt was not the only one to complain about Monday's Downing Street reception. Paul Wilson, the late senator's 37 year old son, told the Belfast Telegraph that the sight of his father's killer on the steps of 10 Downing Street filled him with despair.
"When I look at his face, I think about the screams of pain he must have listened to when he was mutilating my father. I just cannot understand how he can live with himself. The screams must haunt him, mustn't they?"
In one of the press cabins out side Castle Buildings in Stormont days after his Downing Street visit John White expressed disappointment at Lord Fitt's comments. "I'm slightly surprised that he should have personalised it in this way. He's somebody I admired as a very good and courageous politician. But I think it's absolutely wrong for him and others to be critical of the involvement in the peace process of people like myself.
"We're trying to change the sort of society that we live in here. But if individuals are not allowed to change, then there's no hope of change in society."
He does not overstate the changes that have taken place in his own thinking he has no particular religious beliefs, there was no road to Damascus conversion, and he is "certainly not a pacifist". He reserves the right to return to violence "if the IBA come knocking on my door" or if there is a threat to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland.
"I'd have to qualify that," he adds, after a pause. "It would have to be a complete breakdown, a civil war situation where the police had lost control and my community was coming under attack."
His thinking now is the product of "more than 20 years in prison a lot of reading and a "careful analysis of military tactics, loyalist and republican" which convinced him that violence was futile.
This journey has not distanced him from the hard men of loyalism. He was leader of the Ulster Freedom Fighters group in prison and, since his release, he has set up and helps to run support groups for loyalist prisoners and their families. He mentions the suffering his own mother has endured as one of the reasons for his concern for prisoners' families.
"There's no doubt," he admits, without a trace of either vanity or irony, "that I'm held in high esteem by all the loyalist prisoners."
How much of that esteem was earned by his deeds in the early 1970s is a matter for discussion. In the years before his 1978 conviction for the Wilson/Andrews murders, his responsibility for the crime was an open secret among a large inner circle of police, journalists and activists in the North.
White subscribes to the "true and abject remorse" offered by veteran loyalist Gusty Spence in the announcement of the ceasefires. But beyond that, and a general regret that anyone should have died violently, he is not concerned with repentance.
He talks generally and dispassionately about the 1973 murders, admitting the difficulty of "retrospective analysis." Pressed on the point, he recalls the litany of atrocities which were happening at that time, says that the North was on the verge of civil war. In particular, he singles out the death of a "retarded Protestant boy," 16 year old David Walker, "taken out of his workplace on the Falls Road and shot through the head".
"What led me to do the things I did was a profound hatred at what was being done to our community. It was our way of saying don't you touch our community or this is what we'll do to yours. But it's wrong to get into that now. There were some things done worse than what I did."
About the special brutality of the Wilson/Andrews murders, he has nothing to say, except "There's no doubt it was brutal." He is not troubled about anything he has ever done. "Not at all. No."
A vigilante at 20, he joined the UDA at the time of its foundation. In recent years, he has turned to academic study. He took social science with the Open University and is proud that he graduated with honours. He also has completed an advanced diploma in criminology.
Now 46, White is looking forward, though not with much optimism, to a political settlement. This would allow him to get out of politics, in which his involvement is an historical accident.
"I'm not interested in politics at all. I'd be happy to bow out and get back into business, where I feel more comfortable." He is "into property development," and used to be a builder.
