I was organizing a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference in October 1994 and I got a message that the Prime Minister would like a meeting. I went to the meeting. It was just me and John Major.What Major said to me was this: "If you were in my shoes, what would you do?". He wasn't asking me what a unionist should do, but what he should do. And I knew that I had to give him a sensible answer.

It wasn't too difficult to see that [Ian] Paisley would never do anything positive.

As we take stock of this century of achievement, Ulster Unionists have every reason to feel proud.

I had read an early profile of [Tony] Blair by Frank Millar in which he said that Blair was very keen on the 'consent principle'.

The Republican movement have not behaved properly over the years. They have not themselves implemented the Agreement. If they had implemented the Agreement then they would have disarmed completely in May 2000, that is what they undertook to do, that is what they failed to do.

Politics can be likened to driving at night over unfamiliar hills and mountains. Close attention must be paid to what the beam can reach and the next bend.

There was a process in place at that time - the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 - which set out the terms and conditions under which people who had been involved in paramilitary activity could come into the political process.