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Guardian obituary: Quote: Labour foreign secretary, brilliant parliamentarian and debater, he resigned from the cabinet over the second Iraq war in 2003
Brian Wilson
Monday August 8, 2005
The Guardian
'Coruscating debater': Robin Cook. Photograph: Martin Argles
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 very 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 Tony Blair to move him from the job after the 2001 election, and was hurt both by the loss of that high office and the brutality of the execution. But he adapted with elan to the relatively mundane post of leader of the house, and it is by no means the least of his epitaphs that he remains 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. Whether he would have taken precisely the same position if he had remained as foreign secretary remains an open question. 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. It is often forgotten now that much of what became the anti-war lobby was equally opposed to these policies and that 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." The same hanging chads had transformed the whole international environment and probably contributed to Cook's departure from the Foreign Office.
During the Clinton presidency, he was a statesman among friends and enjoyed a particularly warm and productive relationship with Madeleine Albright as US secretary of state. 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 schooldays as Robin - was born in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, the only child of a schoolteacher who became a headmaster. Though his father's profession 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. It was a period of notable turmoil in Edinburgh student politics, and Cook not only participated but observed as features editor of the newspaper Student (under the editorship of Duncan Campbell, now of the Guardian).
Cook eschewed fashionable ultra leftism and 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, and so too 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.
After university, Cook became a lecturer with the Workers' Educational Association, which allowed him to deepen his involvement in Edinburgh politics. He was secretary of Edinburgh City Labour party from 1970 to 1972, and became one of Scotland's youngest councillors when he was elected to Edinburgh Corporation in 1971 at the age of 26.
Part of Cook's strength lay in his widely acknowledged excellence - first as a councillor, and then as a constituency MP. He served as chairman of Edinburgh's housing committee, and was always assiduous in his attention to constituents' problems. This side of his political life may have conflicted with Cook's national image, the prickly and somewhat aloof character - but the view among those he represented of a very approachable man who genuinely cared about resolving their problems was very much closer to the human reality.
When Tom Oswald, the long-serving MP for Edinburgh Central, retired at the February 1974 general election, the bright and articulate young Cook was an obvious successor. His positions were generally Tribunite, but the dominant issue in Scottish Labour politics during the 1970s defied left-right demarcations - it concerned the constitution, and specifically, how Scotland should respond to the oil-fuelled rise of nationalism.
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 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 one of its vice-chairmen. 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.
By the time of the next election, in 1983, it was clear that the internal debate on devolution within the Labour party was effectively over. As both a pragmatist and a democrat, Cook declared his support for a Scottish parliament in a television studio on election night, and became a convinced advocate of the reform. He was also, throughout his career, an unswerving supporter of proportional representation, a doctrine now embraced by the Scottish parliament.
Like many on the left in the early 1980s, Cook had to face up to the implications of Militant entryism and other threats to the Labour party's very existence. In the wake of boundary changes, he switched from Edinburgh Central to the new Livingston seat in advance of the 1983 election. To his astonishment, he found himself opposed for the nomination by Tony Benn, who was at that time looking for a seat. Cook prevailed comfortably and became a key player in the Kinnock, Smith and Blair reforms which made Labour electable.
With each frontbench post that he held in opposition, Cook's stock rose. He singlehandedly destroyed John Moore's prospects of becoming Tory leader when, as health spokesman between 1987 and 1992, he repeatedly took him apart in debates. Probably his greatest Commons triumph was in the 1996 debate on the Scott Report into arms for Iraq. Famously, Cook had only two hours access to the report before delivering the tour de force in which he described the Tory frontbench as "limpets".
Government is more difficult than opposition, and Cook's FCO tenure was not short of its excitements. His involvement in the ending of Serbian domination of Kosovo in 1999 was seen as successful. He was embarrassed by appearing not to have been informed by local diplomats about the Sandline International group of mercenaries in Sierra Leone in 1998, though ultimately took the view that there, the ends justified the means. On the Queen's visit 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 that 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 re-marriage to his former secretary, Gaynor Regan. It is a measure of Cook's competence and prestige, both as a national politician and in his constituency, that he continued to operate effectively and maintain political and public support, in the face of intense and continuing media interest.
Out of office, Cook expanded his interests beyond politics. His devotion to horses extended to all aspects of the equine world and not just his well-advertised love of the turf. He wrote widely and well. But he had not abandoned hope of a return to frontline politics. He was without doubt one of the ablest and most interesting postwar Labour politicians, as well as the most effective parliamentarian of his generation.
His first wife, Margaret, whom he had 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 two sons, Peter and Christopher, from his first marriage, and by his second wife, Gaynor.
· Robert "Robin" Finlayson Cook, politician, born February 28 1946; died August 6 2005 | |
08-06-2005, 02:41 PM 
