Augustus “Gusty” Spence is known in UVF circles as “the alpha and omega” of the organisation’s violent campaign to resist Irish reunification.

An avuncular pipe-smoking 73-year-old, with a handkerchief foppishly drooping from his blazer chest pocket and sporting brogues you could see your face in, Mr Spence does not resist the description, even if his personal “war” ended more than 30 years ago.

He renounced violence in 1974, stepping down as commander of the UVF prisoners in the Maze prison. A decade later he was released after serving more than 18 years for the murder in 1966 of Peter Ward, a young Catholic barman working on the Protestant Shankill Road.

Mr Spence has always denied that he was involved in the brutal sectarian murder of Ward, but admits that he was involved in “other things”.

In the mid1960s he became a founder of the reconstituted Ulster Volunteer Force, the Protestant militia formed by Edward Carson to resist Home Rule for Ireland.

Mr Spence believed that the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising would revive the spectre of a united Ireland and the UVF embarked on a killing spree, ostensibly of members of the moribund IRA but in reality of innocent Catholics.

Mr Spence became a senior statesman, influencing the UVF’s socialistic cadre and arguing that Unionism as a political philosophy had nothing to fear from Irish republicanism. While the UVF’s active service units continued to carry out some of Northern Ireland’s most shocking atrocities, Mr Spence was travelling between Dublin and Belfast meeting senior British and Irish politicians and negotiators.

During the ceasefire preceding the signing of the 1998 Good Friday agreement a senior Dublin diplomat observed that Mr Spence was “Ulster’s Nelson Mandela” because of his long personal odyssey.

“He’s the only one who was involved from either side who genuinely feels remorse about the killings,” the diplomat said.

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