Almost fifty years ago to the day, Monday January 7, 1974, Brian Faulkner resigned as leader of the UUP.

It followed a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council (the party’s governing body) on January 4—a meeting which Faulkner described as ‘an extremely acrimonious debate’—at which a motion opposing the proposed all-Ireland Council in the Sunningdale Agreement was supported by 454 to 374.

The motion, proposed by John Taylor and Harry West (who was to succeed Faulkner as leader) wasn’t framed as a motion of confidence. But shortly after the result was declared, Taylor said, “If Brian Faulkner were an honest man he would now resign leadership of the Unionist Party’.

It was always going to be a difficult call for Faulkner. His party had rejected a key element of the Sunningdale Agreement and if he remained leader he would either be defying the UUC vote if he ploughed ahead with the Council; or risking the automatic collapse of the new executive if he tried to extricate the UUP from supporting it.

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Faulkner Resigns – What Now? – On This Day in 1974

His best option—and hindsight is a wonderful thing of course—would have been to seek a further meeting of the UUC a couple of weeks later (it’s what David Trimble would have done) and see if he could muster support for a much broader motion in favour of continuing with the power-sharing experiment and at the very least give it time to find its legs.

He might even have been able to gather some support from the UK and Irish governments, along with the SDLP and Alliance, his........

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