Intelligence

Robin Cook

Robin Cook - Comment - Times Online

February 28, 1946 - August 6, 2005
Labour politician who stood well to the left of his party, and resigned from the Cabinet over the decision to wage war on Iraq
IN Opposition and in Government alike, Robin Cook showed himself to be one of the finest parliamentary performers of his generation.

Certainly he was one of the Labour Party’s most skilful politicians. In Opposition, he destroyed the career of one Conservative Cabinet Minister and attacked others to the point of persecution. He spoke with wit, elegance, occasional cruelty and not seldom with arrogance.

Yet in parliamentary performances as different as his demolition of the Government position over the Scott report on arms to Iraq in 1996 and the speech he delivered on his resignation as Leader of the Commons over the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he commanded respect and admiration even from those who disagreed profoundly with him.

But his career seesawed between extremes, and the public perception of him did so likewise. At one time it had been possible to think of him as a future Prime Minister. Even after Tony Blair became Labour leader — in a contest which Cook decided not to enter, though afterwards he regretted this — he retained hopes of succeeding. But events in the first period of the Blair Government, in which he served as Foreign Secretary, went a long way to putting paid to these.

The public and painful breakup of his marriage in 1997, involving the revelation of a double life, considerably lowered his personal stock. While travelling to Heathrow Airport with his wife, Margaret, to start a holiday, he was alerted to the fact that a Sunday newspaper was about to expose his affair with his personal secretary, Gaynor Regan. He commandeered a VIP lounge at the airport in which to tell his wife that their marriage was over. The marriage was dissolved with expedition, and Ms Regan swiftly became his second wife.

But Margaret Cook took her revenge in revelations that Cook was a drunkard and philanderer; that he had been ostentatiously obsequious to Tony Blair; that he had relinquished his longstanding beliefs in the party’s Clause 4, nuclear disarmament and opposition to Europe, in the hope of office. Wisely Cook refused to comment on these allegations.

The weakness of his position as Foreign Secretary was that he had never wanted the post. He would much preferred to have been Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the fact that this did not happen was one reason for his dislike of Gordon Brown. Yet their rivalry went back to their early days in Scottish politics. So bitter was the dislike that on the morning of April 2, 1997, at the moment of their party’s greatest election victory since the Labour landslide of 1945, they took separate aircraft from Edinburgh to the celebrations in London.

Shortly afterwards, having been given the overseas portfolio, Cook served notice that he was going to make waves. He implied that he was not going to be the creature of his civil servants. Certainly he made waves. On the Queen’s visit to the Indian sub-continent he infuriated the Indians. On his visit to the Middle East he infuriated the Israelis. Despite his promise of an uncompromisingly ethical foreign policy the sale of British arms to several dubious countries continued.

Although a former CND member he supported the bombings of Iraq, which had continued after the Gulf War of 1991.

Certainly he had his successes. Discarding his earlier views on Europe, he made a good impression in Brussels. He worked doggedly on the various crises in the former Yugoslavia. There was trouble, though, with his party colleagues in the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee when he brushed aside their criticism of the Foreign Office over the arms-to-Sierra Leone furore and backed his officials all the way. He pointedly published his memo exonerating Sir John Kerr, the much- criticised Permanent Secretary, and persuaded Tony Blair to join him in rebutting the committee’s criticism. He may not have been the creature of his civil servants but he was certainly their ally.

All this was in contrast with his years in Opposition, when he had been so much the iconoclast, the conscience of the party, and a leftwinger who might yet be seen as a possible challenger to the New Labour philosophies of Tony Blair. At that period the constituency parties elected him year after year to the national executive, and in the earlier part of his career he had seemed to represent the views of the majority of his party members more accurately than almost any other member of the Shadow Cabinet. He had every qualification to lead his party except one — which he himself acknowledged — his face did not fit.

Arresting though his parliamentary debating style was in its sheer forensic brilliance, it was a hard fact that by the time he came to high office, performance in the chamber had become largely secondary to appearances on the television screen in the public mind. His colleagues believed his appearance would gain no votes, and might well produce ridicule. With his springy red hair, pointed beard and prominent eyes, ears and nose, Cook seemed destined to be lampooned as a garden gnome.

Additionally, he had an irritating and self-righteous manner of speaking. When asked an awkward question he would sound affronted and swallow half of his words in an effort to emphasise only those that he considered positive.

Cook himself recognised that nerve, doggedness and outstanding political talent were not enough to gain the leadership of the modern Labour Party. Despite holding the respect of many of party members he decided not to stand against Blair after John Smith’s death. He admitted: “I didn’t have the votes.”

And he was equally realistic about his chief handicap when he said on another occasion: “I have never been under any illusion that I got elected to anything because of my classical good looks.”

Robert Finlayson Cook was born in 1946, in Belshill near Glasgow. An only child, he was brought up in his early years in extremely modest circumstances. His father was a headmaster, and this made him determined to succeed as a pupil. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and the Royal High School in Edinburgh and once summed himself up: “I have always had the character of the school swot. I was not massively popular at school.”

Things were easier for him, as they often are for intelligent children, at university. He went to Edinburgh University with the aim of becoming a Presbyterian minister, and read English literature, since an arts degree was a useful asset in the Church of Scotland. However, he soon lost his faith and he later he admitted that the Labour Party was a substitute for his original religion.

He had been a schoolboy socialist, having been converted by the New Statesman when he was 14, but it was only at university that he started thinking of a political career. He was elected chair of the Labour Club in the year Malcolm Rifkind was chairman of the Conservative Club.

Cook became a comprehensive school teacher and then a lecturer for the Workers’ Educational Association, but all the time he was thinking of Westminster. He fought Tory Edinburgh North in 1970 and then, after serving as chairman of Edinburgh City Council’s housing committee, he was chosen as the candidate for marginal Edinburgh Central. He won it by fewer than 1,000 votes in the first election of 1974, which was held on February 28. It was his 28th birthday.

He had been attracted to Labour by unilateralism, and as a backbencher he attacked Cruise and Trident, questioned the wisdom of belonging to Nato and voted against the defence estimates instead of following the party line of abstaining. In the House he was a model Tribune Group member. He was always careful to distance himself from the far left, however, and was deeply critical of Tony Benn’s decision to run against Denis Healey for the deputy leadership. And he realised the dangers posed by the Militant Tendency long before some other leftwingers.

He started to emerge as the brightest of the 1974 intake. He duly served his apprenticeship on various party committees before gaining his reward in 1980, being appointed deputy spokesman on Treasury and economic affairs. But just as his stock rose in the House, his hopes of holding Edinburgh Central fell. He realised he would be extremely lucky to win there again. Relief came in the form of Livingston, the new overspill town between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Although there was talk of Benn trying for the seat it was secured by Cook, who held it easily for the rest of his career.

Proof of his growing reputation came when Neil Kinnock chose him as his campaign manager in the leadership contest after the disastrous 1983 election. Cook was also asked to be Roy Hattersley’s campaign manager but, predictably, refused.

Although 1983 was a bad year for Labour, it was a good year for Cook. He was elected to the Shadow Cabinet and given the post of European spokesman — a move that symbolised Labour’s attitude to what was then the EC, because Cook was publicly doubtful about Britain‘s membership.

It was not all plain sailing. Kinnock, who thought Cook was becoming over-confident, shifted him to the lesser post of Labour’s campaign co-ordinator. For a time he was off the front bench, but then his career revived. He became deputy trade and industry spokesman, specialising in the City, and began to be feared — in the City as well as the Commons.

His majority at the 1987 election was up by 6,000 and he was appointed Shadow Social Services spokesman. This was the start of a series of memorable shadow posts — health, trade and industry and foreign affairs — in which he delivered the coruscating speeches which made him Labour’s most menacing front bench performer.

His attacks on two successive Health Secretaries, Kenneth Clarke and William Waldegrave, gained him The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year award in 1991. Michael Heseltine had rarely been made so uncomfortable as when Cook harried him on pit closures. But it was his controlled fury and apparent contempt when dealing with John Moore, the hapless Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Security, that virtually ended Moore’s political career. Before he encountered Cook at the dispatch box Moore had been mentioned as a future Prime Minister. This may have been an over-assessment, but after his duels with Cook it was obvious that Moore’s only future was in the House of Lords.

But Cook’s towering performance in Opposition was at the presentation of the Scott report on arms to Iraq in the House of Commons in February 1996. The report had been in government hands for some time. Cook was given only three hours in a sealed room at the Department of Trade and Industry to take in its 1,800 pages. For the Government, Ian Lang, with the advantage of foreknowledge, appeared to be winning the argument until Cook rose and demolished the government case in a series of witheringly destructive points, which showed he had somehow managed to beat the clock and master all he needed.

But though he may have won the argument — few disagreed about that — he won nothing else. Sir Nicholas Lyell and William Waldegrave, the two ministers he hoped to harry into resigning, both survived. There were no resignations from others involved in the affair, no prosecutions, no civil service demotions. It was his greatest triumph yet he left without a trophy.

Nevertheless, his reward from the party leader after the Labour victory at the general election of 1997, was one of the highest offices of state in his appointment as Foreign Secretary. But Cook did not see it as such. He had always regarded the channelling of his energies into foreign affairs, while Labour had been in opposition, as an attempt to keep him out of policy making at the centre of the party. His insistence on an “ethical” dimension at the very heart of British foreign policy became a high-risk strategy, well meant but unsustainable in the face of Britain’s long-standing commercial alliances and the hideously complex Europe emerging in the wake of the breakup of Yugoslavia.

After the general election of 2001 Cook was relieved of his ministerial responsibilities and offered the leadership of the House of Commmons. It was an obvious demotion, and one designed to keep him even further removed from any influence in the counsels of the party. Yet he accepted it with good grace and announced an intention to set about a process of reform that should modernise the way both houses went about their business. Dearest to his heart was a completely elected Upper House, but this was never a government priority, and was to remain a dream.

When it became clear from 2002 onwards that Blair intended to commit Britain to war on Iraq alongside the US, Cook made his unease clear to the Cabinet. He said with some force that he did not believe that the intelligence proved that Saddam Hussein could possibly pose a strategic threat to a country such as Britain, and that it was preposterous to claim that this menace could be launched in the short time that was being posited. But his objections were pointedly ignored, and his career in the senior ranks of Labour government finally came to an end when in March 2003 he resigned from the Cabinet over the impending war, in a speech that was given a standing ovation in some parts of the House.

That was the effective end of his career. Yet he remained loyal to the Labour Party, refusing, once he had had his say, to snipe at what he felt had been a decision both morally and strategically wrong, and one that was likely to enmire Britain and her forces for a long time to come. Evidence that Blair, in spite of their political differences, still respected his political abilities came when Cook was asked to tour the country during the election campaign this year, specifically to try to reassure Muslim communities over British engagement in Iraq. It was an uncomfortable task that he unhesitatingly agreed to undertake.

Though he altered over the years, notably in his attitude to Gordon Brown, towards whom he had latterly mellowed, at bottom there was an undeniable whiff of Old Labour about Robin Cook. He was a closet Keynesian, and still believed in public spending and taxing to find the money. What remained basic to him was his feeling for the party which turned him from a potential theologian into a practical politician.

Besides the Labour Party Cook loved horses. He rode at every opportunity. He spoke and wrote knowledgeably about racing, and his tipster’s column in The Herald of Glasgow was widely read. He published Point of Departure, an insider’s account of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. He also enjoyed deer-watching, and was a keen mountain walker. It was while he was enjoying this favourite pastime that he apparently suffered a heart attack that led to his death.

Robin Cook married in 1969, Margaret Whitmore, whom he had met at university. The marriage was dissolved in 1998. He married in that year Gaynor Regan. She survives him with the two sons of his first marriage.

Robin Cook, PC, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1997-2001, was born on February 28, 1946. He died on August 6, 2005, aged 59.

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