The tragedy of John Major was that he lacked the freedom of manoeuvre in parliament that would have allowed him to pursue the peace process with the vigour it required.
When Tony Blair came on the scene with his huge majority, he had the freedom that Mr Major lacked.
A senior loyalist spokesman advised opponents of the process that there were 179 reasons why they should get on board: that was the majority Mr Blair secured in the British general election.
Mr Blair's visit today comes in the wake of a highly-significant statement of his philosophy on the peace process, published in a British Sunday newspaper.
Unlike many statements by political leaders in this age of the spin-doctor, the Observer article is said to have been written by Mr Blair himself.
Elements of the world's media, with their penchant for the "sexy" line, picked up on a rather vague comment by the Prime Minister where he appeared to rule out possible SAS action to "take out" the `Real IRA' and similar organisations.
As he is presumably well aware, that would be to play directly into the hands of the rump republicanism that still clings to the old methods of the bomb and the bullet.
But the real significance of the article was its firm declaration of support for and commitment to the peace process, even in the wake of the worst atrocity of the Troubles.
"There is no issue about which I feel personally more deeply committed, or more responsible," Mr Blair writes, with admirable conviction. Although the "surface" content of the article is important, the piece is also very interesting for the underlying concerns that one glimpses here and there in the text.
British political leaders are not always frank and open about their sensitivity to world, and especially US, opinion on Northern Ireland. Mr Blair notes that however constant mainstream British opinion was in its opposition to paramilitaries and their political allies over the years, "the same was not always true of world opinion".
What he calls the "ambivalence, at its lowest" of US opinion towards British policy had even senators and congressmen castigating Britain and siding with Sinn Fein.
Co-operation with Dublin also left a good deal to be desired.
But there was a different picture now, in the wake of the Belfast Agreement: "Opinion, in the Irish Republic, the US and the world is solidly behind the settlement."
There is also an implicit acknowledgment, however tactfully worded, in the article that the search for a military solution to the Northern problem was misguided and that, whatever measures might be required in the short-term to deal with the Omagh bombers, putting security first and politics second was not the right approach.
Looking back to the period before the Provisional IRA put its guns aside, Mr Blair recalls that "a host of different security measures, emergency legislation and sanctions" including internment, were tried in the fight against terrorism - "but the truth is they didn't defeat it".
Here we get a fascinating mirror-image of the conclusion drawn by republicans that whatever paramilitary stratagems they tried in order to achieve their aims, a military victory over the British was simply not possible.
It would go against the thrust of Mr Blair's article if a decision were now taken to restore internment to the British government's armoury of security measures.
He asserts that such measures, "hardened support for the political wings of terrorist groups. They were often politically counter-productive, seen as a substitute for political progress".
While elements of public opinion might have been panicked by the Omagh horror into dismissing the peace process, the Prime Minister appears to have been shaken but not stirred.
He writes that it is simply not true that Omagh happened due to "appeasement" of terrorism. The splinter group behind the bomb had nothing to do with the Belfast Agreement and regarded Gerry Adams "not as an ally but as a traitor".
Later in his analysis he indicates that the possibility of Hamas-type opposition to the agreement had been foreseen: "Every peace process had been bedevilled by people determined to wreck it."
Even on decommissioning, Mr Blair has things to say that some unionists at least will find unpalatable.
However powerful and necessary disarmament might be as a symbolic gesture, "it is - again, a blunt truth - a deception to claim there is a finite amount of weapons that, once decommissioned, can never be replaced".
Sinn Fein leaders will take comfort, in what has been a fairly difficult week for them, from Mr Blair's assertion that "Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are serious about peace".
While pledging that "whatever is required will be done" on security, if this revealing insight into the Prime Minister's thinking can be boiled down to one simple message it is this: politics comes first in Northern Ireland and the peace process will continue.