Jim Allister, Traditional Unionist Voice MP for North Antrim since 2024, is the most experienced new member of the House of Commons, a King's Counsel whose political career began more than half a century before he first won the seat. He took it by ending the longest dynasty in Northern Irish politics, and he did so by 450 votes.

Born in 1953 into a farming family at Listooder, near Crossgar in County Down, he was educated at Regent House Grammar School in Newtownards and read law at Queen's University Belfast, graduating with distinction in constitutional law. Called to the Bar in 1976 and made Queen's Counsel in 2001, now King's Counsel, he built a career at the criminal Bar that has shaped his politics: forensic, procedural and combative. That he represents North Antrim despite being a County Down man is a small irony in a career otherwise defined by rootedness.

His unionism is older than most of his colleagues' careers. He joined the DUP at its founding in 1971, worked as Ian Paisley's European Parliament assistant from 1980, and was elected to the Assembly for North Antrim in 1982, serving as the party's Chief Whip until it was dissolved in 1986. He fell out with Paisley in 1987 and returned to the Bar, sitting briefly on Newtownabbey Borough Council, before coming back to the DUP in 2004 to succeed Paisley himself as MEP, where the TaxPayers' Alliance rated him among the hardest working in the UK delegation.

Then came the break that defined him. In March 2007, opposed to power sharing with Sinn Féin, he resigned from the DUP, and in December he founded the Traditional Unionist Voice. The new party cost him his European seat in 2009 and lost to Ian Paisley Jr at the 2010 Westminster election, but Allister returned to the Assembly in 2011 and held it through 2016, 2017 and 2022 as, for most of that time, the TUV's only MLA. His 2021 Functioning of Government Bill, on ministerial accountability, showed he could draft as well as denounce.

The 2024 result was the culmination. The Paisleys had held North Antrim for fifty four years, Senior from 1970 and Junior from 2010. Allister took it on 11,642 votes, 28.3 per cent, with a majority of just 450, helped by a TUV electoral pact with Reform UK, and called it "the end of an era and a dynasty". Paisley Jr asked for a partial recount.

The achievement is historic and the limits are obvious. The majority is barely one per cent on a vote share under thirty, the TUV remains effectively a vehicle for one man with a handful of councillors behind him, and his association with the creationist Caleb Foundation marks the hardline edge of his politics. At 73, with a King's Counsel, more than fifty years in unionist politics and the Paisley scalp, he is a formidable parliamentary operator. The question his whole career has built towards is whether a single TUV MP can turn forensic opposition into anything more than obstruction.