David Simpson is a cheery family man, runs his own business, has energy left over to be in politics and is unknown outside his home town. He's a DUP member of the suspended Stormont Assembly, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
On Wednesday 23rd, he became mayor of Craigavon and smiled happily from the front page of the district's weekly paper.
This Tuesday the DUP formally "selected" him as their local candidate for the next Westminster election: since Simpson has been candidate in waiting since the last election, this was a pretty bogus selection, conducted in Portadown.
Portadown is chief town in the Upper Bann constituency, and this is psychological warfare. Upper Bann is Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble's last claim to authority, and Mayor Simpson is on course to take it from him. Portadown nine years ago was the scene of a Trimble triumph that has turned to ashes in the mouth.
This Sunday is Drumcree Sunday, an Orange big day. Or rather it was Drumcree Sunday until about three years ago, when it became undeniable that Drumcree was a dead parrot. It may by now be necessary to explain that Drumcree is shorthand for an Orange march which in the past caused large quantities of strife, disruption and, arguably, several deaths, and which still costs substantial amounts for policing.
David Trimble won the internal contest which made him leader of the UUs, it is widely agreed, to a considerable degree because of his involvement, in 1995 and 1996, on behalf of the Drumcree Orangemen, and their demand to walk past the Catholic homes on Garvaghy Road.
The Orangemen have not walked Garvaghy Road now for seven years. For the past six David Trimble has been finding it unpleasant to walk through Portadown. Many Orangemen blame him for the banned march almost as much as they blame Garvaghy Road. Unfair, but politics is rarely fair.
The charge against the UU leader is that the Belfast Agreement, concluded in April 1998 - chief unionist signatory, the MP for Upper Bann - at least in principle put the two main communities on equal footing in the eyes of the state. After that, it was going to be difficult if not impossible for the threat of widespread loyalist disorder, in reply to a ban, to throw the decision ever again in favour of the Orangemen. But the Parades Commission made the recommendation against the Garvaghy Road route: the commission was set up a year before the agreement.
Tell that to the unionist voters of Upper Bann, whose enthusiasm for their MP has fallen in a sequence of nerve-shredding thuds. In the 1997 Westminster election the Trimble majority was over 15,000. In the 1998 Assembly election the UU-DUP gap was 7,000. In the 2001 Westminster poll the Trimble-Simpson margin was just over 2,000. In last year's Assembly election there were fewer than 400 votes between UUs and DUP.
The UU leader is as outraged by the Parades Commission now as when it made its first decision, as scornful of the Garvaghy Road residents and as adamant that the marchers have an inalienable right to take their "traditional route home from a church service", as it is always billed. But Ulster Unionists are now the second-largest unionist party. Trimble now is not Trimble then.
Nor is the Orange Order what it was. Four successive years of major disruption because of Drumcree did nothing for the Orangemen's reputation. They brought Northern Ireland to a standstill to support the Portadown lodge. But it cost them in the eyes of the wider world, and in internal disarray.
In the run-up to this year's Drumcree Sunday there came a story stranger than fiction, that far from being cherishable heroes the Drumcree Orangemen were now in poor standing with the order. It seemed they might even be told that their march to the church service was against order rules - because they have had contact with the Parades Commission.
The commission says its judgments are influenced by the efforts made by marchers and objectors to reach agreement. The order objects to the commission's existence. Now marchers banned by the commission are threatened with another ban from their own organisation: you couldn't make it up.
This week Garvaghy Road looks very different from its embattled state a few years back. The sole major slogan on a wall is an amateurish "All you need is love". Only the stubs of ragged flags are to be seen on lamp-posts, and newly-built houses for sale face spruced-up public housing. A community once forlorn on the fringe of Portadown Orange citadel looks more now like a mini-west Belfast, a city within a city.
It's a long road, Garvaghy, and it has seen some curious turnings.