Mr. Jonathan Powell:

I touched on this before but I can elaborate. As soon as he became leader on taking over from John Smith, one of the first things he did was to reverse the Labour Party's policy on Northern Ireland from being a persuader for unity to supporting John Major in the peace process almost regardless of anything else. He stuck to that. He wanted a policy of bipartisanship and he supported John Major even when he thought he was doing things wrong on Northern Ireland because he thought it so important that the peace process worked and he had consensus. From working in places like Colombia and Spain, we know that if there is not political consensus, it can become a political football and much harder to make peace. It was really a very wise decision and the Tories sort of stuck to it in subsequent years while we were in government. We had bipartisanship on the Northern Ireland issue, which was crucial.

The question on his personal commitment is interesting. I cannot quite explain it. He said it was something to do with his Orangewoman grandmother in Donegal on his summer holidays - I believe there is something to that - and he was conscious of Northern Ireland. In opposition, we spent time thinking about Northern Ireland. We met Sir John Chilcot, who at that stage was the Permanent Secretary in the Northern Ireland Office, along with Mo Mowlam, and we spent time thinking about what we would do in government.

As I mentioned, Tony wanted his first visit after becoming Prime Minister in May 1997 to be to Northern Ireland. The first time he went outside London, eight days after his election, he went to the agricultural show at Balmoral and made a speech to reassure unionists. He was afraid, correctly, that unionists would be nervous about a Labour Government and would think we would sell them out. There had not been such a government for a long time and they had memories of Harold Wilson and so on.

He was determined to use the political capital he got from his election to help solve the Northern Ireland issue. Again, as I said, there is no political advantage to that in Britain and one does not get any votes for making peace in Northern Ireland. To his credit, John Major devoted much time and effort to trying to make peace, again with no political benefit in Britain.

However, for Tony Blair it was not something he got interested in when in government. It was something he felt very deeply and in opposition he had decided this was going to be one of his top priorities. As I mentioned earlier, he took risks. There was risk in expediting things like bringing Sinn Féin in very quickly, which was dangerous for him, keeping the unionists in and persuading them to stay in despite the DUP being out and then saying he would get to an agreement within a year. His analysis was John Major had allowed the thing to unravel by not getting into inclusive talks. He found it politically difficult to do so and he kept Sinn Féin in the waiting room, which was a political mistake. I understand why he did it - his script was limited - but that was what Tony Blair was determined to do.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, the civil servants were telling him not to do it, that is, not to have a deadline of one year because if he did that, the whole thing would have gone bust and we would have had nothing to work with. They told him to play it long but he insisted on having that deadline. When we turned up in Belfast, I remember George Mitchell saying to Tony "I don't know why you've come. There's no chance of an agreement". We did not feel very good when he made that famous sound bite about the hand of history when we went into Hillsborough. He decided it was really important, he put his political capital into it and he really devoted a huge amount of time to it over his ten years as Prime Minister. He spent a great deal of time talking to unionist leaders, to Ian Paisley, to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, to David Trimble, to John Hume and to all the leaders of the other parties, including Alliance. No British Prime Minister since the 19th century devoted that much time to the Irish question. Luckily, this time it actually led to success.