Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt was fully entitled to offer a confident address to his party's annual conference at the weekend after a prolonged period in which he has comprehensively outmanoeuvred his bitter rivals in the DUP.
However, while his policy of undermining the DUP by seizing on the kind of strategy which Peter Robinson previously used to bring down David Trimble has been hugely successful, Mr Nesbitt has left himself wide open to accusations of double standards.
While he claimed to have been entirely vindicated by last week’s official report which indicated that the IRA still existed, albeit in non-operational form, he failed to dwell on the finding in the same investigation that the various factions in the UVF and UDA also remain very much in business.
It will be recalled that Mr Nesbitt said it was a point of principle that his party could not remain in a compulsory coalition with Sinn Fein but just a year earlier he was prepared to voluntarily enter into a close association with the political representatives of loyalist paramilitary groups during a highly contentious initiative in support of Orange parades.
Mr Nesbitt will probably not lose too much sleep over that basic contradiction as he has managed to reverse his party's setbacks of the last decade and convincingly present the DUP as a fading and confused force.
Indeed, Mr Robinson has been so alarmed about the Ulster Unionist revival that he was prepared to expose the DUP to public ridicule through its laughable in-out ministerial resignation tactic rather than risk an early Assembly election.
There can be little doubt that Mr Nesbitt will return to Stomont with a significantly strengthened party grouping whenever the poll takes place, so his firm assurance that he wants to work with nationalists, and completely rejects the DUP’s attempts to brand Sinn Fein and SDLP ministers as `rogues’ and `renegades,’ is a welcome development.
It is even possible to envisage the circumstances in which the Ulster Unionists could actually overtake the DUP in the medium term, an outcome which would have been dismissed as fanciful when Mr Nesbitt became leader in 2012.
He correctly told delegates on Saturday that the opportunity existed through the present negotiations for the creation of a collective political will to remove paramilitarism from Ireland once and for all.
All that Mr Nesbitt needs to remember is that illegal organisations remain in place on both sides of the political divide and the same levels of disapproval need to be maintained in each direction.
