Brexit: David Trimble’s legal challenge to the Irish backstop is a hiding to nothing

One of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement, David Trimble, is threatening legal action against a controversial part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, writes Colin Murray

There has always been something of Don Quixote about David Trimble, the awkward politician who never really shrugged off his persona as a legal academic. In 1998 no one could deny the urgency with which he sought to right seemingly unrightable wrongs. In reaching the Good Friday Agreement – also known as the Belfast Agreement – the then leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) set out to build a new Northern Ireland, one free from the spectre of political violence and shorn of the sectarian discrimination of the past.