Mr. Rory Montgomery:

I was saying this is the way negotiations are and the higher the level, if you like, the greater the chaos and thicker the fog of war. That is how it is. My point is twofold. First, I talk to a lot of academic researchers, students and so on. A lot of the time you get the impression they think that somehow the agreement was engraved in tablets of stone and handed down from Mount Sinai. The reality is it came about in the way we described, so there is a lot in it that was not particularly carefully thought through. It was not a question of every word, syllable and comma being weighed but the overall. To compare with EU treaties, there tends to be a very strong legal service and secretariat that are building up the text incrementally as you go along and bits are filled in as you finish and things are decided upon.

In this case, however, with the exception of the constitutional stuff, it was all almost thrown together in the past few days. It was not a very orderly process.

A final point is that Trimble was not on his own. He had some very important people with him, including Reg Empey and the McGimpsey brothers. In the end, even John Taylor stuck with him across the line, as did Ken Maginnis. It was far from a solo act. His leadership was crucial, however. He was elected leader after Jim Molyneaux in 1995. The other three candidates were Taylor, Maginnis and William Ross. I do not think any of them would have been capable of getting quite as far as he did.