True test for Trimble will be consolidating his success

So, in this new era of extraordinary conversion, the betting is on about which will happen first: a rapprochement, no matter how token, between Adams and Trimble, or the political demise of Ian Paisley.

Is it possible to have ''one defining moment'' after another? If it is, then Trimble has bagged at least three in the past month. That fiery instance when he marched from the Good Friday Agreement to sell the deal to his party executive symbolised the beginning of his transformation from provincial politician to someone with enough courage to lift his eye to the far horizon.

At that tense meeting - whose failure would have ruptured the Treaty before it had even been put to the people - Trimble's view prevailed. At last he had stamped his imprimatur on the Party which, amid rancour, had elected him leader almost three years before.

Now, he was really free to endorse the Document, and within minutes he returned to Castle Buildings, moving through the battalions of cameramen and down the narrow corridors still at that clipping pace but without a sense of crisis in his stride.

The US President's influence can't be underestimated here. The granting of an American visa to Adams, and what was perceived as the greening of the White House, outraged Trimble who felt undermined by it, but the intelligence was that Sinn Fein and the IRA urgently wanted a way out of the mess.

So, Bill Clinton went into facilitator mode: he offered Trimble friendship, included him in the Oval Office's Irish book of contacts, and persuaded him that sticking with the negativism of generations would be his downfall, along with that of the entire Province.

Then, with the change of government in Britain, came the same sort of pressure from Tony Blair, whose majority could easily withstand any Unionist threat.

But it would be unfair to say that nothing more than expediency has led Trimble this far. ''He has made a very unusual journey,'' says one of the aides to Bertie Ahern, the Irish Taoiseach.

''Trimble always played his cards very close to his chest, but even during the previous Irish government he was beginning to change.''

John Bruton, the former Irish prime minister, found him latterly open to solutions and to meeting people in a way he would never have tolerated before. ''Privately he even visited Bruton's home.''

So has it been a Pauline conversion? ''As much as I would like to tell you that, it is not yet quite the case,'' says a former Queens' University colleague of Trimble's.

''He knew there was no other way to go. And suddenly he was no longer just an Ulster

politician but someone who could pick up the phone to the American president.

''At the St Patrick's night dinner in Washington this year, people were saying that if the Peace Agreement were successful, Trimble could be in line for a Nobel. A lot of politics is about ego. That sort of opinion from others strengthens the courage to take risks.''

But in the weeks that have followed since the signing of the Accord, Trimble, a man who seems demonstrative only in anger, has experienced many mood swings.

Upbeat about the Peace Agreement one day, he'd be gloomy the next, that almost whispering voice not able to hide the old muscular truculence and suspicion.

In the down days he would sometimes privately express scorn for those moderates around the peace table, campaigning for equality safeguards to be built into the Treaty. And on the worst days, he would confide to closest allies that he believed he had committed political suicide.

At that point, though, any identity turmoil was understandable. This was the man hailed in the summer of 1995 as the victor of Drumcree. When a multitude of bowlered and be-ribboned Orangemen laid siege to a couple of fields, he held that peppery temper in check as best he could.

He entered the fray, applied his lawyer's skills, and after negotiations lasting 48 hours, the march proceeded to the loyalist Citadel of Portadown, but only by skirting, in agreed and unaccustomed silence, the Catholic neighbourhood under contention.

A Trimble medal was struck in his honour and within weeks he was elected to succeed James Molyneaux as UUP leader.

Under normal circumstances he would never have been Molyneaux's choice, or that of the party grandees, and instead of winning over those who had opposed him, Trimble made life difficult, ensuring that they easily became his enemies.

So, there were lots of old scores being settled in the run up to Friday's referendum. Molyneaux himself came out against a Yes vote as, of course, did Jeffrey Donaldson, the Lagan Valley MP whose air of choirboy sanctity now looks decidedly anxious as he seeks to climb back into Trimble's favour. Donaldson says he will accept the people's verdict, and while holding true to his concern about decommissioning, he insists he will serve to make the Assembly work.

Really he can't say anything other. Gary McMichael, of the working class UDP, which has close insight into the UDA, will stand against Donaldson for an Assembly seat, Lagan Valley being a constituency where 60% of Unionists are thought to have ignored their MP's example and voted Yes.

But Trimble is still faced with the wrecking refusniks of Unionism, the hard No campaign which now lives to bring down the Assembly, just as it smashed the Sunningdale Agreement more than 25 years before.

And even though the people, by a three to one majority, have given Paisley's DUP and the UK Unionist Robert McCartney their marching orders, they won't be shunted into oblivion just yet. These are individuals whose sense of denial is so intense they can proclaim their 29% of the vote as an ''overwhelming victory''.

But what Paisley in particular can no longer ignore is that many of those he once urged to the top of the hill were the ones who suffered while he went roaring on. They are the ones who chanted ''Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio'' as he entered the Counting Hall; they are the ones who deserted him to form the Yes ranks of the UDP and PUP.

For Trimble now, consolidating his new sense of leadership into something recognisably statesmanlike and conciliatory will be as much a test as anything else. Maybe he feels threatened by it, but Mo Mowlam's tactile informality vexes him greatly, and he has never been a man socially at ease.

Still, in the past months Trimble has gone through a tough learning process about himself. At the U2 concert, he was quite genuinely overwhelmed by the exuberance of that young audience urging him and John Hume to go forward together.

And, in the same week, when he told the Unionists that they must stop clinging to The Troubles as a comfort blanket, you sensed at last that here was a man not just talking to others, but to himself.