Ian Paisley loves to tell the story of his first meeting with his mentor, the Rev W.P. Nicholson, a famous Ulster revivalist preacher. “Young man, have you ever seen a cow’s tongue?” asked the venerable evangelist of the young firebrand. “Go into a butcher’s shop, get a cow’s tongue laid out on the counter and rub your hand up it the wrong way, and it will cut you like a file. It will bring the blood.” Nicholson then prayed: “Oh God of hosts, give this young preacher a tongue like an old cow.”

The Rev Ian Paisley took this advice. “Even my infidel opponents”, he has boasted, “would bear witness that God has answered that prayer, for my tongue has drawn the blood of many an opponent and many an enemy of the Gospel.”

Well, the Old Cow seems to be turning into a great, slobbering St Bernard — keen to lick as many hands in Belfast, Dublin, London and Washington as he can. Politics can do funny things to people, even to men of God. After last week’s Assembly elections, which reaffirmed the ascendancy of Mr Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, the “Doc” would appear to enjoy the mandate to do the deal and to enter a power-sharing executive alongside his sworn republican foes.

Why has Mr Paisley changed? What, indeed, were the past 40 years about if he is about to sit cheek by jowl as co-premier alongside Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein-IRA? What was so terrible about those “sell-out” leaders of moderate Unionism whom Mr Paisley so ruthlessly destroyed — such as Terence O’Neill, the Ulster Unionist Premier of the late 1960s, who merely sought a few cautious reforms of the old Stormont system? Or Brian Faulkner, the first Unionist leader to attempt a power-sharing compromise with nationalism in 1974? Or what about David Trimble — excoriated for signing up to the 1998 Belfast agreement whose key provisions remain in place?

The dark suspicion must be that Mr Paisley’s great surges of holy writ were as much about himself and his own position within the unionist family as about vast differences of principle between himself and these long-vanqushed rivals. Every established institution within the Ulster-British family seemed unable to accommodate his vast ego.

Consider the record. Mr Paisley split the Presbyterian Church in Ireland because of its supposedly ecumenical tendencies, and in 1951 founded his own Free Presbyterian denomination. He founded his own Protestant Unionist Party — later the DUP — because of Ulster Unionism’s alleged weakness. He even left the main Orange Order for the Independent Orange Order. He wrecked the most hallowed concept of Unionism, “United we stand, divided we fall”.

The truth is that Mr Paisley has always loved being top dog. And after years of marginalisation, he savours such tokens of respectability as a privy councillorship for himself, a peerage for Mrs Paisley and the Doc’s latest pet project — the prospect of a solitary moment in the Oval Office with President Bush this forthcoming St Patrick’s Day (and, who knows, maybe even the chance of a shared prayer together?).

The big mystery here is Mr Paisley’s rush to do the deal. Tony Blair obviously needs a success in short order so as to go out on a high note. But from Mr Paisley’s standpoint, why not wait until Gordon Brown takes power and give the new PM a success? And why not wait until after the Irish elections in May, thus depriving Sinn Fein of a boost in the Republic? The truth is that the DUP has always been a purely provincial party purporting to operate in the Protestant interest. It remains resolutely indifferent to the effects of its actions upon Irish democrats in the Republic.

So where does Mr Paisley’s new found emollience leave the Union? There is certainly a defeatist strain within the DUP, personified by the former Conservative MP Andrew Hunter, who ran as a DUP candidate in the 2003 assembly election. After that poll, Mr Hunter told me: “Trimble sold the pass and administered the death blow to the Union. All that remains now is for us to go in and negotiate Protestant homeland within a united Ireland on as advantageous a basis as possible.” Mr Hunter confirms that this remains his view today — and he regards republican talk of unity by the time of the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916 as not unrealistic. He claims that Mr Paisley can at times see that this is the logic of events — but that the DUP chieftain still does not fully accept it.

Certainly, the vast bulk of the Unionist electorate do not think that they have voted for such drift: indeed, the very reverse. What will be the ructions within the DUP and within the Free Presbyterian Church when they discover otherwise? The DUP’s Janus-faced ambiguity served it well when Sinn Fein participation in government was entirely theoretical. But what happens when it becomes a reality? And could such arrangements survive beyond the lifetime of the frail Mr Paisley?

Whatever now happens, to have got even this far constitutes an achievement for Anglo-Irish statecraft. For years, officials have smirkingly counted upon the defeatism, vanity and venality of much of the Unionist political class to push through a project of creeping condominium with the Republic. But who would have thought that Ian Paisley, the ultimate “honest bigot”, would turn out to be their last card?

Dean Godson is author of Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism

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