Sir John Major:

It is a very good question. The lessons are actually very straightforward, at least the key lesson that remains with me from those years. There are two things I would emphasise again and again, because so much comes back to it, which are you cannot agree if you do not talk or if you do not listen or if you think you hold the wisdom of the world in your hand and those engaging with you are necessarily wrong. You have to have an open mind, you have to talk, and you have to listen and if that were inscribed in every part of government in every part of the world, we would be living in a much happier planet than we do at the moment.

As to the complexity of it, I remember many years ago remarking that the peace process was a little like trying to put together a complex Rubik's cube with a gun attached because that is exactly what it was like. There were many different pieces in the puzzle that had to be brought into the whole before we could finally get an agreement, which is one of the reasons neither the joint declaration nor the frameworks agreement, nor indeed the Good Friday Agreement itself, would have won an award for plain English. There is a degree of flexibility written into them and without that, we would never have got everybody to sign up to them. That is another lesson. The essence of negotiation is you do not get everything you wish to have. That is true for every negotiator and it is probably true of every successful conclusion to negotiation the world has ever seen. Those are the lessons I take from the discussions we had.