Sir John Major:

There was no great secret about it in many ways. Some of it was conventional; some of it was not. It was to be invariably available to all the party leaders, if they wished to talk, to try to get as much of a continuing dialogue going, even if the dialogue was not complete because somebody was left out of it or somebody chose not to enter into it, as the unionists did from time to time. It is like travelling a long distance by bus. If the bus stops, you may never get there. You need to keep the bus going, even if it is only ticking over and going very slowly. From time to time we did have to produce stratagems to keep talks going when they looked as though they were at a stalemate. That was what I meant in a sense by unconventional.

I also meant, at the time I said it, the private link, which was absolutely necessary. If we had said publicly that we were going to have an open link to the provisionals, the IRA, there would have been a huge fuss in a large part of the British Parliament. It would have been unacceptable. We were breaking a convention that had been there for a long time that one did not talk to people who engaged in terror. What we were doing then was very unconventional, but, of course, the alternative to breaking that convention and talking was that the violence would have continued and there would have been no move to end it. It was things of that sort that I had in mind.

I also meant, and this is not particularly unconventional, the fact that, just as you needed to keep, as I put it, the bus running all the time, you also needed to make sure that the relationship between the two Governments in particular was continuous and did not break apart. The great virtue of having Albert and John as interlocutors was that it was possible to disagree with them and it was not going to bring anything to a juddering halt because they shared exactly the same ambition I had. It was those things I had in mind. There was no great secret about what they were.