One of the problems in the North is that everybody knows everyone else. There are few delightful surprises. Yet when Sir Reg Empey said in a television discussion that unionist politicians had "used" loyalist paramilitaries through much of the Troubles and that he had been wrong 34 years ago to join Vanguard - an umbrella group for loyalist paramilitaries as well as unionist politicians - he silenced his audience and, for the moment anyhow, the loquacious Gregory Campbell of the DUP.
It was a brave and honest thing to say, acknowledgement of something long denied with consistency, heat and very often, threats of legal action. The Ulster Unionist leader deserves praise and recognition. He will get neither from many Protestants, and most unionists. Nor may he reap appreciation from nationalists, though he should: what he said cannot be unsaid.
Campbell's insistence that the DUP "do not have discussions with people linked to terrorist organisations or who are front people for terrorist organisations", and his rewriting of the 1974 loyalist strike to assert that his party had not "sat down with paramilitaries", seemed to prompt Empey's frankness. Earlier he had made the point, but in passing, that "unionist politicians used the paramilitaries for their own purposes".
At that point he was explicitly trying to justify his invitation to David Ervine, the sole representative of the UVF's tiny front party in Stormont, to join the UU group in the Assembly - a move that could give Empey's party one more ministerial position than Sinn Féin.
Sir Reg himself called this "a tactical decision" to give unionists the majority of executive positions, push Sinn Féin into third place behind the two unionist parties; though he went on to claim that in addition it was part of a high-minded strategy to detach loyalists from violence. It was universally mocked as a stunt, and one which would surely backfire since security forces, other paramilitaries and the media agree that the UVF is responsible for most of the killings in the last six years.
Right on cue, last Monday persons unknown shot leading UVF man Mark Haddock.
He remains critically ill, the chief suspects are his own organisation.
Embarrassed faces around Empey in Stormont testified to unease and worse in the party. Here was a demonstration of how low the once mighty Ulster Unionists had fallen and how humiliated they have been: that they should claw themselves into second place behind the DUP, through taking, as Campbell gloated on television, a "representative of active terrorism into their group and potentially into the heart of government". Sir Reg did his best to sound competent at Stormont but left an impression of gabbling. Ian Paisley promptly wallowed in righteous identification of his communal rivals with "Sinn Féin/IRA". The final blow came from observers who pointed out disobligingly that any deal about a new executive will surely be followed by another Assembly election. Sinn Féin and the DUP will both want to have another go at wiping out their respective rivals. Sir Reg's hard-won "extra ministry" will almost certainly evaporate as the UU's vote continues to fall.
But the next time he faced a sizeable television audience he made a convincing comeback. A telling line on the Let's Talk programme was his "this isn't simply an opportunistic thing" admission of the element that blighted his chance of taking the high moral ground in Stormont. On the same panel Mark Durkan swatted Gregory Campbell's brazen profession of the DUP's purity from paramilitary association, past and present, with a ringing: "For years unionist politicians justified the nonsense that loyalist violence was only a reaction to republicans."
Empey acknowledged the SDLP leader, remarkable in itself: "All of us - a lot of us - have not had an absolutely pristine record in terms of dealing with paramilitarism. There's a lot of truth in what Mark said." He thought unionist politicians had a responsibility now to "clear up the mess", because in the 1970s and '80s they had used paramilitary organisations for political purposes: "That's a fact." He recalled that the DUP and his own party had been in the same voting group in Belfast City Council for years with David Ervine's party and the UDA's representatives, "and that's when there was no ceasefire".
Mr Campbell watched him in silence. It was a point that Ulster Unionists, like the DUP, were in the habit of dismissing angrily at the time, with much abuse of the journalists who put it to them.
Yes, he had been in Vanguard, Empey said, the umbrella group including politicians and paramilitaries which backed the 1974 loyalist strike, "and I think my attitude in 1974 was wrong". Sir Reg broke ranks, and tore up the pretences. The oddity is that he should have flouted such a tribal rule and had the courage to question his own past so soon after meriting universal scorn. But he did it.