It was a bit of a Michael Portillo moment when the DUP Stolwart Mervyn Story lost his seat in the recent Assembly election.

The former executive minister and long-standing Paisley Confident had looked solid enough in the early stages of the North Antrim Count,

but TUV transfers didn't materialise and the Alliance candidate pulled out to overtake him and that was the end of

Mervyn's story. In a moment he was a former MLA watching on as a sea of yellow embraced the success

of North Antrim's first female MLA, Patricia O'Linn. Welcome to Red Lines Mervynne's

is it painful listening back to that pocket-sized up-sum of your political demise?

In a sense, yes, because you can't give 18 years of your life to public service and being a member of the Assembly, and, you know, a day after it's all over,

in a sense. So from that perspective, yes, it wasn't a day that we, in a sense, enjoyed. However,

I have to say that I look at life through another prism, which is for me more important, which is I have a very strong faith.

And people who know me know that repeatedly during the election campaign, I use the verse in Romans 8 and 28,

which says, all things work together for good. And I have to accept that even when there are dark providences in our life,

that while I can give a political spin on what happened on that day, there is overarching

all of that, a very clear direction as far as I am concerned in my life, that that was

the end of that chapter in the way that it was and the opening up of something

different.

So do you think there was a greater hand at work?

Oh, I believe that every day in my life because the scriptures makes it clear that by

Him, by Christ, all things consist.

So I've always, my faith is not something that I just put on the Sunday. It's something that I seek

by God's grace to live by every day. And I can't take what I believe when the sun is shining

and saying, that's all God's will. And then when it's a day of adversity and difficulty,

say, oh no, that wasn't. Clearly, what happened on that day. And even how the day

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