Usually, Peter Hain spends Christmas on South Africa’s Cape peninsula, where he was brought up and where his sister Sally still lives. This year the extended Hain family, all 15 of them, took up residence for the festive period in Hillsborough Castle, his official Northern Ireland residence.

He has to pretend to like the place, but Hain genuinely seems to have taken a shine to Northern Ireland. Asked how long he will stay there, he says: “I am not keen to move; I want to see this through. I really like the place and the people. You take a lot of stick, but in whatever jobs I have done I have sought to focus on where you can really change things and make a difference, and that is what I would like to do.”

The Northern Ireland secretary has the ability to get on with people and is a good listener as well as talker. His Labour colleague Paul Flynn has said of him: “He has the capacity to be on all sides simultaneously.”

In his other life, Hain is secretary of state for Wales and the principality was sufficiently impressed to vote him politician of the year for 2005 in a television poll.

It was at a Christmas party in the Wales Office that Hain introduced Ian Paisley, the Democratic Unionist party leader, to his parents, Walter and Adelaine. Some of those present expected sparks to fly. After all, it was less than a month earlier that Paisley had called for Hain’s resignation. But it turned out that they had something in common. Hain’s parents had both been imprisoned in South Africa for their opposition to the apartheid regime. Paisley, who likes to describe himself as “an old jailbird”, has been imprisoned twice in Northern Ireland for leading demonstrations.

Soon Walter Hain and Paisley were swapping reminiscences of Robben Island and Crumlin Road jail in Belfast. In his speech later Hain referred to them as “two old rebels”, but remarked that while his father was still a rebel, Paisley had now joined the establishment and was about to lead it. The humour, like the introduction, showed a sure touch with the DUP. Paisley was flattered and laughed uproariously. Some guests wondered aloud if prison terms would prove as convenient an ice-breaker between the DUP and Gerry Adams.

“I must say I like Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson,” says Hain. “Whether or not we have fierce arguments is not the point, I just like them as individuals. The same goes for Reg Empey as well, but particularly for the DUP people. They are easy to get on with.”

Hain’s rapport with the DUP is one of the surprises of his tenure. When he arrived in Belfast, the BBC dusted off a file of militantly nationalist statements he had made in the 1980s as a Labour left-winger. “Partition was and remains unjust and undemocratic . . . British policy was to promote and foster sectarian and religious division,” Hain wrote in a magazine in April 1988. Elsewhere he advocated Irish unity, British withdrawal and a tough line with unionism by any future Labour government.

With previous secretaries of state, any sign of a strong opinion on Northern Ireland has produced an immediate political squall, but Hain’s track record was stronger than the others’. Today he dismisses all that firebrand stuff, saying, “I’m not going to defend comments made 20 years ago in circumstances that are light years away from where we are now. That is part of the yellowing newspaper cuttings.”

He denies that the remarks were ever raised with him by unionists, though he concedes that they were brought up by a group of women from the loyalist Shankill Road. “Frankly it’s water off a duck’s back,” he said.

Hain was born in Nairobi and only came to England when his parents were barred from South Africa in 1966. His relentless campaigning against the apartheid regime made him a target for Boss, the South African intelligence service, which maliciously implicated him in a bank robbery for which he was subsequently acquitted.

He recalls: “Early on in my time here Gerry (Adams) and Martin (McGuinness) brought that up when I was talking about the Northern Bank. They were rejecting any suggestion that the IRA was involved in the robbery and they were making kind of jocular digs saying, ‘Well you were framed once, weren’t you?’”

It cut no ice with Hain, who told them: “There is no doubt that the IRA did it. The chief constable is absolutely right.”