Sir John Major:

The broadcast media were predominantly helpful and so was a large part of the written media. Although I mentioned The Timeson this occasion, The Timeswas also, on other occasions, helpful about the process. Not everyone in the media was helpful about it. Some were not. Some did not think it would ever come to anything. Some thought we were unwise to have entered into it. Some still clung to the notion that the only way to behave was to say you would never deal with terrorists or people who use violence under any circumstances. This is a point I have addressed once or twice. It was a patchwork. No one paper was universally hostile. Sometimes there would be a hostile article, perhaps through misunderstanding or perhaps through a bad briefing. One of the problems we faced continually was that there was always the risk that somebody was going to brief privately from a particular perspective of their own and it was not really a briefing that was justified. It might be self-interested or perhaps it was a briefing without full knowledge of the facts. We did get unhelpful stories from that sort of thing but I do not think people went out of their way to block the move towards peace generally. I think there was a lot of supportive media as well as the occasional difficulty because of stories that emerged.