Robin Cook: Robin Cook, who has died suddenly at the age of 59, was one of the cleverest and most creative figures in modern British politics. He devoted his entire career to the advancement of the Labour Party and the pursuit of radical change within society.
Cook was one of the few contemporary politicians whose national reputation was built principally within the chamber of the House of Commons. He was a brilliant, coruscating debater whose most devastating performances combined lofty ridicule and forensic analysis in equal measure.
If Tony Blair was the Labour leader whom the Tories learned to fear in the country, Cook was the Labour frontbencher whom they had long since come to fear and loathe in the Commons. Nobody contributed more, during the long years of opposition, to the rebuilding of morale, the restoration of Labour's credibility as a potential party of government or the shredding of Tory reputations.
Cook was never much of an organiser on his own behalf, yet regularly topped the shadow cabinet poll of MPs during the opposition years. This was an unpleasant process which involved much trading of blocks of votes and the fact that Cook emerged in prime position simply reflected the fact that no MP with the slightest interest in advancing Labour as an effective opposition would have wished him to be anywhere but in the front line.
Cook's intelligence and grasp of issues made him an impressive foreign secretary when Labour won the 1997 election, highly regarded on the international stage. However, it was inevitable that declaring the advent of an "ethical foreign policy" would invite constant efforts to find fault lines between rhetoric and reality, at the personal level as well as in his approach to issues.
He did not expect Blair to move him from the job after the 2001 election and was hurt by the loss of that high office and the brutality of the execution. But he adapted with élan to the relatively mundane post of leader of the house. He remained the only serious politician who has tried to replace the corrupting system of patronage which underpins the House of Lords with a democratic chamber.
Cook's resignation from the cabinet over the second Iraq war in 2003 came at a time when his Lords reforms had run into the prime ministerial buffers. Having decided to go, he did so with characteristic gravitas and style, pointedly declining to cross the line which separates honourable dissent from embittered treachery.
Cook had good reason to understand the poisonous realities of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As foreign secretary, he presided over the enforcement of a sanctions regime which was specifically predicated on the need to contain Saddam's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, as well as the enforcement of no-fly zones to limit the risk of renewed aggression. Much of what became the anti-war lobby was equally opposed to these policies, and Cook was an object of their opprobrium.
The basis of his opposition to the invasion was that essentially nothing had changed and that the threat remained containable. In his highly effective resignation speech, Cook asked: "Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years and which we helped to create?"
He then provided his own answer: "What has come to trouble me most over the past week is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops."
During the Clinton presidency, he was a statesman among friends but, long before the supreme court finally handed George Bush his victory, the need to be in there first and friendliest with the anticipated new administration had become the overriding priority of British foreign policy. That was not Cook's natural instinct.
Robert Finlayson Cook - known since school days as Robin - was born in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, in 1946, an only child. Though his father's profession of headmaster took them around Scotland and Robin's schooling was in Aberdeen, there was a family background in Edinburgh, and it was there that he went to university, graduating with an honours degree in English literature.
He ploughed into student Labour politics. He was chairman of the Scottish Association of Labour Students in 1966-67. Although Gordon Brown was several years younger, their careers overlapped from these early days as did a friction which lasted more than 30 years and only recently looked like being reconciled. Its precise origins, certainly by Cook's own account, remained a mystery to him.
Part of Cook's strength lay in his widely acknowledged excellence, first as a councillor and then as a constituency MP. He was assiduous in his attention to constituents' problems and, while his national image was of a prickly and somewhat aloof character, the view among those he represented was of an approachable man who genuinely cared.
Whatever the basis for earlier disagreements with Brown might have been, there is no doubt that their respective positions in the run-up to the 1978 Scottish devolution referendum reinforced them. Brown had started to build his political reputation as an advocate of devolution. Cook was one of its most articulate opponents and, when the Labour Vote No Campaign was founded, he became a vice-chairman. The referendum failed to deliver devolution and was followed the next year by the fall of the Callaghan government when Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives won the general election.
In the 1980s Cook became a key player in the Kinnock, Smith and Blair reforms which made Labour electable. With each front-bench post that he held in opposition, his stock rose. Probably his greatest Commons triumph was in the 1996 debate on the Scott report on arms for Iraq. He had only two hours' access to the report before delivering the tour de force in which he described the Tory front bench as "limpets".
Cook's foreign office tenure was not short of its excitements. His involvement in the ending of Serbian domination of Kosovo in 1999 was seen as successful. On the visit by the queen to Pakistan and India in 1997, he had to make it clear that whatever he may have said privately, he had said nothing publicly about British mediation in the Kashmir dispute. He gained great if sometimes grudging respect from the mandarins, but the challenges he faced were compounded by the highly publicised upheavals in his private life, culminating in the break-up of his first marriage and his subsequent marriage to his former secretary, Gaynor Regan. His first wife, Margaret, whom he married in 1969, described him as an exemplary father who, because of his capacity for taking a moral stand, found opposition easier than government. He is survived by sons Peter and Christopher, from his first marriage, and by his second wife, Gaynor.
Robin Cook, born February 28th, 1946; died August 6th, 2005