David Trimble’s passing shows how much politics has changed – and not just in Northern Ireland | Martin Kettle

Neither Liz Truss nor Rishi Sunak is a Tory in the sense that he understood it - they show no interest in preserving the union

I realised David Trimble and I would get on fine when we met for the first time. Over lunch just off Whitehall in the early 1990s, I asked Trimble, in those days the embodiment of a hardline backbench Ulster Unionist MP, if he ever spent time in the Irish Republic. With a grin, he replied that he had just recently been in Dublin for a performance of Leo Janaek's Kat'a Kabanova, a work he greatly admired. We spent the rest of the lunch talking about opera as well as politics. It was clear that this was a unionist politician who was worth knowing.

And so it proved over many years, in conversations of every kind. Trimble, who died this week, was smart, approachable, sometimes sharp, but above all an immensely practical politician. He came from a relatively liberal unionist family background in County Down, but he always knew he had to carry his ardently loyalist base in his Upper Bann constituency along any new path that he advocated or that events required. He was one of those politicians who think around corners, not in straight lines, the best sort.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist