You wait decades for a woman MP in Northern Ireland and then two come along at the same count centre. No sooner had Lady Sylvia Hermon been returned as the representative for North Down yesterday than Ms Iris Robinson was elected across the floor of the Newtownards count centre. But apart from their gender, the victors could hardly have had less in common.
Lady Hermon's win was greeted with the polite applause of well-heeled supporters; Ms Robinson was acclaimed with raucous cheers from the flagwaving DUP. Ms Robinson thanked God for her victory; Lady Hermon credited the Alliance Party and the Women's Coalition for helping hers. Lady Hermon thanked the RUC, as her husband Jack, a former chief constable, stood quietly in the background. Ms Robinson also acknowledged the force, but to the proprietary applause of supporters who consider themselves its last defenders.
The two candidates' incompatibility was sharply highlighted when, earlier in the day, UTV attempted a joint television interview with them, apparently without having explained the idea first. When the two realised what was happening, it was a close thing as to which of them rebuffed the other first. But the consensus was that the UUP candidate turned on her heels just before her rival.
While the women were forced to share their historic distinction yesterday, there was only one candidate in Newtownards for the day's big loser. Outgoing MP Robert McCartney arrived for the declaration knowing his fate, and muttering: "Nil desperandum". But in his role as Sideshow Bob, he at least got to deliver some good lines.
With bitter irony on a day when women swept the boards, he began by quoting Kipling's "If", the poem that advises how to "be a man, my son". He had had enough experience of "triumph and disaster" to treat "those two imposters" both the same, he said. But he didn't keep up the philosophical tone for long. Referring to the withdrawal of the Alliance Party in the UUP's favour, he claimed he had been beaten by a union of two more imposters, "one unbelievable, and the other unelectable".
Then, perhaps drawing from his experience of criminal law, the QC painted a wider conspiracy. The SDLP's vote was suspiciously down in the constituency, he said, and the fringe loyalists had pitched in too in support of his enemies. "If three or four people set upon someone in an alley, it's likely that he's going to get well beaten," he said, closing the case for the prosecution.
Lady Hermon had won by about an hour the distinction of being the North's first woman MP since Bernadette Devlin.
Declining to respond in kind to any of the QC's barbs, she instead concentrated on thanking supporters, including her strategic allies.
She declared her belief that "you have to fight for what you believe in this life, and I believe in the [Belfast] Agreement and in the people of Northern Ireland".
Then Mr McCartney gave her a cold handshake and departed the political stage.