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 knew what I had to do as party leader had to be sensible and relate to the real situation we were in, rather than a situation you would like to have.

The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind - a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish.

The one thing I can assure you is that I'm not going to do a Prescott.

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.