In the end the Rev knew his time had run out
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Ian Paisley knew his days as DUP leader were numbered.
As he approaches his 82nd birthday next month, he has been aware of growing disillusionment within the senior ranks of his party at his touchy-feely relationship with Martin McGuinness.
The tag 'The Chuckle Brothers' may indeed have raised a chuckle, but within the hard-line DUP there was a different reaction.
After decades of declaring "No surrender" to republicans, saying "Yes" and going into government with Sinn Fein sowed the seeds of his own downfall.
The announcement that his time as First Minister -- what his wife Eileen is said to have called "his destiny" -- will end after one year was no great surprise.
Once his son Ian Jnr was forced to resign as a junior Stormont minister last month after being at his father's side since the moment he took office, he looked a little isolated.
He has been an MP, MLA, MEP and church leader, and there are few people who have not heard of 'The Big Man'.
"No" and "never" were the words associated with him, as one political initiative or another floundered to his opposition.
No one would have disagreed when, on May 8, 2007, he stood beside Tony Blair at Stormont to become First Minister with Martin McGuinness as deputy and declared: "If anybody had told me a few years ago that I would be doing this I would have been unbelieving.''
But the Chuckle Brothers were born, and devolution bedded down, in a way that had not been possible for Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble when he became first First Minister following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and ended up folding the assembly.
Snapping
But then Ian Paisley did not have an Ian Paisley snapping at his heels yelling "No".
Mr Paisley opposed the agreement, but went with the St Andrews Agreement ,which in 2007 provided a few minor tweaks to the 1998 original, and led to the return of devolution.
The founder of the Democratic Unionist Party and the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, he was born in Armagh on April 6, 1926, and brought up in Ballymena, Co Antrim, the son of a Baptist minister.
He honed his trademark thundering oratorical style at the pulpit of his church on the Ravenhill Road in Belfast.
He forged links with the Christian fundamentalists across the world, particularly in the US Bible Belt.
Critics accused him of having stood in the way of every political initiative in the North since the 1960s. He has denounced, in the strongest language, the evils of Irish Nationalism and Republicanism, and fought a long-running and bitter feud with the Ulster Unionists.
Paisley sat in the old Stormont parliament from 1970-72, known as a man who could not be compromised.
Elected Protestant Unionist Party MP for North Antrim in 1970, he topped the poll in every election since. An MEP from 1979 to 2004, he was kicked out of the Strasbourg chamber on his first day for denouncing the Pope as the Antichrist.
In 1972, he formed the DUP, which after decades as the No 2 of unionist politics came to the fore when it swept the UUP aside at the 2005 general election and again at last year's assembly election.
On one occasion, he led 500 men brandishing firearms certificates up a Co Antrim hill in the dead of night.
- Ian Graham
