PUBLIC perceptions of Robin Cook seesawed with the vicissitudes of his remarkable career, scaling the heights and sliding down the walls of political misfortune. But few will ever forget his finest hour.
It was a bravura performance in the House of Commons in February 1996. After only two hours to speed-read through the Scott report on the arms-to-Iraq scandal, a 2,000-page document spread over five volumes, Cook demolished the last shreds of the Major government’s political credibility at the dispatch box.
His coruscating, forensic critique was punctuated by his theatrical pounding of the Scott volumes, like an Old Testament figure delivering judgment. The speech helped to sweep Tony Blair to power and gave Cook political capital, if not many friends. But history will probably remember him as Blair’s most awkward minister and the minister whose career as foreign secretary was wrecked because he sneaked out to feed his double life and his mistress’s parking meter.
His ex-wife famously ridiculed him as a drunken philanderer with at least six affairs under his belt after he told her at Heathrow airport in 1997 that he was leaving her for Gaynor Regan, his secretary, whom he married the following year. Alastair Campbell, then Blair’s chief press adviser, had rung him on his mobile in the VIP departure lounge to tell him he had to choose between his wife or his mistress.
However, after his resignation as leader of the Commons over the war in Iraq in March 2003, his political fortunes were slowly on the rise again. His supporters had every expectation that should Gordon Brown — his old enemy, to whom he was reconciled — succeed Blair as Labour leader, Cook might be offered a new cabinet post.
With a column in the Racing Post to satisfy his passion for horseracing, marriage to Regan, walks with their terriers and weekend hill climbs in the Highlands, life looked good again for the man once derided as “Neil Kinnock’s hair bank”.
Earlier this year he declared he had no regrets. “I only feel a sense of relief, strengthened every time I reflect on the failure of the Americans to find these weapons of mass disappearance,” he said.
A thorn in Blair’s side to the end, Robert Finlayson Cook was born in Belshill, a coal and steel town to the east of Glasgow, on February 28, 1946.
He spent his first four years there in a semi-detached council bungalow with his mother Christina and her mother-in-law. His father Peter, the son of a miner blacklisted for his part in the 1926 general strike, was a science teacher in Aberdeen but could not afford to move his family there. As a result, he lived in rented accommodation and came home in the school holidays until he could afford to rent rooms for his family. Even so it meant young Cook sleeping in a small bed next to his parents.
Little wonder that he grew up in an old Labour background. His first recorded written words were jotted in a diary at an Aberdeen primary school when he was seven: “Today Joseph Stalin died. All the people of Russia will be very sad.”
Reading most of Dickens’s novels by the age of 10 probably helped to instil his sense of social injustice. In 1960 father and son joined the Royal High, a prestigious boys’ school in Edinburgh; Peter as head of science, Robin as a reluctant pupil. It was there that he learnt the art of debating that was to hold him in good stead for his political career. He was president and star of the school’s debating society in his final year.
A journalist who saw him speaking with no notes and, for much of the time, no microphone in Yorkshire earlier this year described it as one of the most memorable political speeches he had seen.
Cook studied English literature at Edinburgh University where he began to grow his beard and started going out with Margaret Whitmore, a medical student from the West Country. They married in Bristol in 1969 after a three-year courtship.
Cook had started to read the New Statesman when he was 14. He came to Labour through the ban-the-bomb cause and joined the party while at university in 1965. A year later he was making his first forays into national politics.
Along with his friend and fellow future MP Martin O’Neill, he spent the 1966 general election as a heckler who disrupted meetings held by the Earl of Dalkeith, the sitting Tory candidate in Edinburgh North.
In 1970 he stood in his first general election for Edinburgh North. He was defeated and settled instead for a seat on the city council before being elected to parliament for Edinburgh Central four years later. He served for nine years before being elected to the new overspill town of Livingston in 1983.
Cook made his name at Westminster with his condemnation of the Tories for their closure of the coal mines. Following John Smith’s death in 1994, he “desperately wanted to be leader”, but felt he lacked the courage to stand. “My looks and personality are very much of the school swot. I’m not good-looking enough to be leader,” he admitted. He was nicknamed the garden gnome.
When Blair took Labour to power in 1997, he made Cook foreign secretary. Cook swiftly proclaimed an “ethical foreign policy” and announced that Britain was to become a force for good in the world, but found the stance difficult to sustain.
Cook had reached the pinnacle of his career with one of the most important jobs in British government. One morning in August 1997 he went for a furtive walk around the street outside his home in Victoria, London. He fed a few coins into a parking meter next to a Renault Clio car and slipped back into his flat.
The photographs of this domestic scene, caught by a passing paparazzi photographer, were not hard to fathom out. Cook had a ministerial Rover. His wife was back home in the Scottish constituency. Once that car was traced to Regan, the secret was out.
The News of the World prepared to publish the story and telephoned Downing Street. It was left to Campbell to call Cook as he and his wife were flying off on holiday. She had even packed his case, including the expensive new suede chaps that she had bought him for a riding trip in Montana.
His double life exposed, Cook chose to stay with his mistress, 11 years his junior. His wife took her revenge in a no-holds-barred memoir in which she told of finding Cook “flat out” on the dining room floor with a brandy bottle.
As his Westminster career faded, he was demoted to leader of the Commons after the 2001 election. But even after resigning that post over Iraq, he stayed close to the party.
A sign that Blair still rated his political abilities was his decision to ask Cook to tour the country in the run-up to this year’s general election to speak to Muslim communities distrustful of Labour.
Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North, said last night: “His sense of diligence to being a backbench MP and the way of his resignation over the Iraq war I think is much respected by an awful lot of people. This is very sad news.”
PRINCIPLES CAME FIRST
I admired and valued Robin as a colleague and friend and as one of the greatest parliamentarians of our time
— Gordon Brown
I used to joke with him that he was born with a red beard and a copy of The Guardian under his arm
— Lord Foulkes, Labour peer
He had a waspish manner and a rather unattractive style in many ways, but the fact remains that he was a man of very considerable principle
— Sir Malcolm Rifkind, shadow pensions secretary
He was piercingly brilliant — funny and forensic, brave and cunning, a democratic socialist and humanitarian in every atom
— Lord and Lady Kinnock
He was such great fun. He loved racing and came down to meetings even when he was foreign secretary
— John McCririck, racing pundit and friend
In opposition he destroyed the careers of several ministers and in government he was never bested
— Sir Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat MP
