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.