William Hague had a dose of it yesterday, just as Tony Blair had before him. Neither of them would have been surprised: after all, it has become the quasi-divine right of party leaders to be swamped in the ovations and adulations of their party conference. But one man will have no such luck. David Trimble will not be forced to adopt a pose of shy modesty, halting the rolling applause of delegates when he faces the Ulster Unionist conference tomorrow. On the contrary, he will face an audience at least half of which is plotting his downfall - scheduled for a special meeting of the party's ruling council at the end of the month. The plotters are the likes of William Thompson, one of Trimble's MPs who yesterday offered this comradely assessment of his leader's position: "He is on the skids and cannot survive."  Thompson and friends want Trimble to pull out of Northern Ireland's fledgling administration, thereby collapsing the institution. As the secretary of state, Peter Mandelson, warned yesterday, that's a fast track to putting 1998's Good Friday agreement in the deep freeze if not the morgue. The plotters' motives are a mix of conviction - they reckon the agreement has brought unionists too little and republicans too much - and self-interest: after the hardliners of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists snatched the UUP stronghold of South Antrim in a byelection last month, they fear for their own political skins.  So Trimble has no shortage of reasons for walking away from the peace process: he wants to keep his job. Nor would he lack arguments. He could say the South Antrim result shows his community has lost faith in the accord. He could point to the early release of terrorist prisoners and the proposed name change of the Royal Ulster Constabulary as proof of how much unionists have been asked to give - and the lack of progress on decommissioning as proof of how little they have won in return. He could cite the loyalist civil war and yesterday's bomb alert on the Belfast-Dublin railway line, almost certainly the work of dissident republicans, as evidence that the peace process has brought plenty of process - but all too little peace.   For all that, he should not walk away from the peace table. First, he should remember that, when the unionist people had a chance to vote on the Good Friday agreement, they voted yes. That moral mandate remains - and with it a moral obligation not to destroy the accord. Only a no vote in a new referendum can remove that duty.  Second, he has a powerful response to those who say the agreement has brought unionists nothing. Trimble   can boast - indeed should have spent two years boasting - that, thanks to the deal he negotiated, unionists have won enormous gains. For the first time, republicanism has accepted the partition of Ireland, confirmed by Sinn Fein's presence in the Belfast executive and assembly. What's more the Irish Republic has given up its historic claim to the north, rewording its constitution accordingly. No unionist leader ever won such a prize before.  But if these advances seem abstract, Trimble should ask unionists to look around. Yes, there is still violence - from the fratricidal feuding on the Shankill Road to the enduring menace of the Real IRA - but the once all-pervasive threat from the provisionals has been quieted. The IRA has made as clear as it can its resignation from warfare, opening up its once top-secret arsenals to outside inspection - unimaginable a decade ago. More concrete still, unionists can see the change the peace process has made - with foreign investment flowing in and business at last allowed to flourish.  If none of that prevails,   Trimble should ask the nay-sayers what they would do in his place. Do they really think that ending self-rule in Northern Ireland would make decommissioning more likely - that if unionists say no, then republicans will say yes? What logic is it that makes the rejectionists believe they can refuse every compromise - keep the RUC as it is and share no power with nationalists -yet still expect the other side to keep giving? Mandelson is right: unless both sides give and take, there can be no accord.  That means nationalist flexibility on policing and republican movement on decommissioning, but it also requires a reciprocal approach from unionism. For peace processes have their own dynamic: if one side refuses to budge then the other does, too. The result is not always a return to the status quo ante, but something worse - a lurch back into all-out confrontation. If they doubt it, unionists need only look at that other stalled peace process -now spilling blood in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.  Those seeking the removal of David Trimble, unionism's most accomplished peacemaker, should think on that. The absence of peace is not a vacuum - it is war.