Obituary: David Trimble, Northern Ireland's first first minister

Lord Trimble's decision to back the Good Friday Agreement was a defining moment in his political career.

The then Ulster Unionist leader earned a place on the world stage, mixing with presidents and prime ministers.

He and the then Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader, John Hume, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

He was Northern Ireland's inaugural first minister in an assembly that took years of bitter arguments to form.

And he weathered so many challenges to his leadership and policy that commentators called him the Harry Houdini of Northern Ireland politics.

William David Trimble was born on 15 October 1944 in Bangor, County Down.

A law lecturer at Queen's University in Belfast by profession, he entered politics through the hard-line Vanguard Party in the early 1970s.

As such, he opposed the Sunningdale Agreement that had tried to broker a power-sharing agreement and create a new Northern Ireland Executive.

He played an important strategic role in the loyalist strike that brought down the executive less than six months after the agreement was signed.

Ironically, the Sunningdale proposals were not far removed from those he would himself campaign for 20 years later.

He was elected as Vanguard member for Belfast South in the short-lived Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention in 1975.

But Vanguard fell apart over proposals to form closer links with the nationalist SDLP and Trimble joined the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP).

He held a number of positions within the UUP and finally entered Westminster as an MP after a by-election in Upper Bann in 1990.

His strong unionist credentials were bolstered when he led a controversial Orange parade down the nationalist Garvaghy Road in Portadown, County Armagh.

The march, from Drumcree Parish Church, was the scene of clashes between nationalist residents and the Orange Order in past years, and in 1995, for the first time the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) moved to prevent the march from taking place.

After a stand-off that lasted two days, police allowed the march to go ahead as long as the Orangemen walked in silence, without the normal band music.

Trimble, wearing his Orange sash, marched alongside the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader Ian Paisley in front of hundreds of Orangemen.

At the end of the road, the two men held their linked hands in the air in what was interpreted by the local community as a gesture of triumph.

Trimble later protested that he had only held Paisley's hand to prevent the other man from hogging the limelight.

His hard-line stand at the parade helped him in the race to become Ulster Unionist leader, when he defeated the frontrunner John Taylor.

There were some who feared that his swaggering approach spelled the end for the peace process.

But three years later, he and Seamus Mallon of the SDLP were appointed first and deputy first ministers in a new Northern Ireland Assembly.

He became the first unionist leader since the 1920s to negotiate with Sinn Féin and pushed ahead with talks in spite of the opposition of half his parliamentary party.

In October of the same year, Trimble and Hume were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The citation said: "As the leader of the traditionally predominant party in Northern Ireland, David Trimble showed great political courage when, at a critical stage of the process, he advocated solutions which led to the peace agreement."

There were stumbling blocks - Trimble often found himself locking horns with republicans over the IRA's failure to decommission its weapons.

He resigned as first minister and the Northern Ireland Executive lurched from suspension to suspension.

His critics said he had gone back to his hard-line roots, but he denied that.

Thanks to decommissioning, he continued to share power with Sinn Féin, even if that put him out of step with close colleagues.

His party was deeply divided and he was under pressure.

In 2001, an angry crowd greeted him and his wife Daphne in Banbridge, County Down, after the general election - he held on to his seat but by a much-reduced majority.

The Democratic Unionists treated the election as a second referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, fiercely attacking the UUP and winning five seats - just one fewer than their unionist rivals.

The IRA agreed to put some weapons beyond use in October 2001, and Trimble agreed to return to government, but his critics were not happy.

In September 2002, he and Jeffrey Donaldson came up with a compromise plan, giving the IRA a four-month deadline to give up violence for good.

But just a few days later, there was news of an alleged IRA spy ring inside Stormont and the assembly collapsed again.

Attempts to resurrect devolution failed.

There were rows within the UUP and half of its Westminster MPs resigned the whip.

But Trimble still managed to defeat Donaldson in a leadership challenge in September 2003.

The November 2003 election saw the once-powerful UUP fall into third place behind the DUP, to which Donaldson and two other MLAs had defected.

The general election of 2005 marked the end of Trimble's political career.

The UUP was reduced to holding just a single seat at Westminster, where once it had held 10.

Among the casualties was Trimble himself, who decided to stand down as UUP leader.

He later told the BBC that he had made a mistake in not standing down in 2003, but said there had been no-one coming forward to take on the leadership.

He was made Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the original name of Lisburn, his adopted home town, and joined the ranks of Conservative Party peers.

There was speculation that he might have been offered a Cabinet post if the Conservatives had won the 2010 election outright.

But the forming of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats meant he was not included in the government ranks.

Instead, he turned his attention to the Middle East, becoming a strong advocate for Israel and a fierce critic of Hezbollah, the militant group based in Lebanon.

In recent years, he was also vocal in his opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol - part of the 2019 Brexit deal that keeps Northern Ireland in the EU's single market for goods, preventing a hard border with the Republic of Ireland.

Lord Trimble argued that it put the Good Friday Agreement at risk.

David Trimble was married twice. His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 1978 he married Daphne Orr. The couple met when he was one of her lecturers while she was studying law at Queen's University, Belfast.

Daphne Trimble stood unsuccessfully as an Ulster Conservatives and Unionists - New Force candidate for Lagan Valley in the 2010 General Election.

Boating was one of the family's favourite pursuits. In later years, they owned a narrow boat that they used to explore the English canal system.

The Trimbles had four children - Richard, Vicky, Nicholas and Sarah.

In 2019, speaking during a House of Lords debate on same-sex marriage, Lord Trimble revealed that his daughter, Vicky, had married her girlfriend.

"I cannot change that, and I cannot now go around saying that I am opposed to it because I acquiesced to it. There we are," he said.

His daughter said she was "a little surprised" by his wording but that how he deals with her and her wife speaks louder than his words.

Nicholas Trimble has followed his parents into politics. In June 2020, he was elected mayor of Lisburn and Castlereagh.

In 2017, Lord Trimble wrote to the former deputy minister, Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness shortly before he died, telling him how much he appreciated his efforts to make devolution in Northern Ireland work.

"You reached out to the unionist community in a way some of them were reluctant to reach out to you," he wrote.

"I and my colleagues believed that you were indispensable."

In June, a portrait of Lord Trimble by artist Colin Davidson was unveiled at Queen's University.

At the ceremony, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, called him a "passionate and determined peacemaker" and there were video messages from former US President Bill Clinton, former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

David Trimble will be remembered as a street politician who won the Nobel Peace Prize; an academic who walked on an international political stage; and a man who brought the Ulster Unionists into a historic agreement for Northern Ireland.