Born                          15 October 1944

Constituency           Upper Bann

Party                           Ulster Unionist Party

Majority                     2,058 in the 2001 Westminster Elections

David Trimble was educated at  Bangor Grammar School and Queens University, Belfast and worked as a Barrister and University Lecturer at Queens before entering Politics in the 1970s. He joined the Vanguard Party and then became a member of the Ulster Unionists. He stood in the 1973 Northern Ireland Elections against the Sunningdale Power sharing agreement pledging ""not to allow murderers and Quislings to destroy Ulster and hand it over to the republicans". He also worked to organise the 1974 General Strike that brought down the Stormont Government and led to direct rule from Westminster.

Trimble's  Political Career has seen him move from the hard-line display of Orange Order  defiance when he marched down the Garvaghy Road hand in hand with Ian Paisley in 1995 to signing the Good Friday Agreement and  going into Government with Sinn Fein and other Nationalist groups in 1998.

In the words of  David Mckittrick, Trimble went on: "a remarkable political journey from the hard-line fringe of Unionism to the moderate centre ground; from involvement with Bill Craig's ultra-rightwing Vanguard to leadership of a government including the former IRA chief-of-staff Martin McGuinness."

He was elected for Upper Bann in the first Northern Ireland Assembly elections in 1998 and went on to become Northern Ireland's First Minister.  Throughout his term of office Trimble faced a number of backbench criticism of his leadership especially over the perceived lack of movement on decommissioning.

The Northern Ireland Assembly was first suspended on 11 February 2000 by the Secretary of State to prevent David Trimble going through with his threat to resign if there had not been any progress on IRA decommissioning. The suspension was lifted on 29 May 2000 only to be suspended again on 14 October 2002 after allegations of IRA intelligence gathering.

Trimble was jointly awarded the Noble Peace Prize with John Hume of the SDLP in December 1998.  In his acceptance speech Trimble said "What we democratic politicians want in Northern Ireland is not some utopian society but a normal society. The best way to secure that normalcy is the tried and trusted method of parliamentary democracy. So the Northern Ireland Assembly is the primary institutional instrument for the development of a normal society in Northern Ireland."