Gerald Morkel, who has died in Cape Town aged 76, pioneered coalition politics in South Arica and played a key role in the formation and survival of the DA.
The DA was formed in 2000 after an amalgamation between the New National Party and the Democratic Party.
Morkel, who was provincial leader of the NNP and Western Cape premier, strongly opposed NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk, who was keen for the NNP to throw in its lot with the ANC instead.
Morkel had a strong following among the politically all-important coloured community of the Western Cape, and his resistance to Van Schalkwyk's preference for the ANC was pivotal.
He saved the DA from collapsing when Van Schalkwyk pulled the NNP out of the alliance in 2001 and joined the ANC.
Morkel refused to go along, denouncing it as "foolish and unprincipled". Thanks largely to his efforts, the bulk of the NNP in the Western Cape refused to follow Van Schalkwyk out of the DA into the ANC.
Van Schalkwyk promptly stripped him of the premiership. Morkel, who remained leader of the DA in the Western Cape, was elected mayor of DA-controlled Cape Town.
But the new NNP-ANC alliance was determined to destroy him, bring down the DA and take over Cape Town.
Its chance came when details were leaked, allegedly by the Scorpions investigative unit, of a close relationship between Morkel and notorious German conman Jurgen Harksen, from whom he had solicited donations for the DA.
The NNP-ANC asked Judge Siraj Desai to lead a commission of inquiry.
Morkel publicly apologised for his friendship with Harksen, admitting that it was "a grave error of judgment". But it wasn't enough to save him.
Desai's report found no evidence of personal enrichment on Morkel's part, but it was sufficiently damning to deal his political career an almost mortal blow.
Desai said he had looked inside Morkel's DA administration and seen "the heart of darkness".
Morkel resigned as mayor and provincial leader of the DA.
He continued serving as a Cape Town city councillor for his Steenberg/Retreat constituency until 2011, when he was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
Morkel was born on February 2 1941 in Harfield Village, Cape Town.
After completing an apprenticeship as a carpenter he began working as a builder, knocking on doors and asking if there was anything that needed fixing.
Then an architect he met asked him to build a holiday home for someone in Betty's Bay. This led to more orders for homes there. He assembled a crew of about 20 and started a business called Morkel Builders.
He became relatively wealthy and sent his first-born son, Garth, to St Barnabas College, a posh Anglican Church boarding school in Johannesburg.
He moved out of a rented council house in Steenberg and built a triple-storey dream house with a pool and a games room in a more affluent part of the suburb.
It was the first house in the area with a pool and there were always neighbourhood children swimming at the Morkel home and playing darts.
He became well known and popular in the largely coloured community, and built his subsequent political career on its strong and unflagging support.
He had always enjoyed talking politics and when he was asked to help a business associate campaign for the Coloured Persons Representative Council, his thoughts turned to a political career.
In 1983 he entered the new tricameral parliament as a member of the (coloured) Labour Party.
He said that for all its faults he believed it offered a chance to engage with and influence the government for the benefit of the coloured community.
The same pragmatic attitude informed his approach to cricket, a game he loved and was good at.
In 1978, when coloureds were allowed to apply for permits to play for "white" clubs, he deserted Hassan Howa's South African Council on Sports with its slogan "No normal sport in an abnormal society" and joined the Cape Town Cricket Club, whose first team boasted the likes of Peter Kirsten and Garth le Roux.
A spinner of note, Morkel played in the second team and got involved in the club's administration, where he felt he helped to remove apartheid from the game.
Although he stuck with the DA, he was a conservative Nat at heart. When ex-DP members of the DA objected to his appointing as an advisor a friend who was out on parole for fraud, the normally mild-mannered Morkel erupted.
He would not take "any bulls**t from these bloody liberal ideas", he said.
"I don't want bulls**t. We need a fighter who will get out there into the trenches, not sit and tap on a computer."
But he hated the ANC even more than the ex-DP liberals whom he did his best to out-manoeuvre before the Harksen scandal brought him down.
He was appalled when two of his sons joined the ANC.
"As long as a heart beats in this chest of mine it will be a DA heart," he said.
He is survived by his wife, Hazel, and four children...