Robin Cook: Out of the wilderness

His ex-wife famously described him as a drunken philanderer but, after his resignation over Iraq, many see him as our most principled politician. Here, Robin Cook talks openly about love, lies and launching a comeback

Call me old fashioned, I tell Robin Cook, but I've always trusted a politician with a beard. Ho Chi Min, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara - these were men you could depend on for an unswerving adherence to their core beliefs.

Call me old fashioned, I tell Robin Cook, but I've always trusted a politician with a beard. Ho Chi Min, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara - these were men you could depend on for an unswerving adherence to their core beliefs.

"You and David Blunkett," I suggest, "represent something of a break with this tradition. Blunkett, who used to be an irreproachable socialist, established a Home Office that, in your words, is more draconian than even the Tories would have dared to be..."

"Yes."

"And you have made substantial changes in your position on many issues: Europe, nuclear disarmament..."

"I have been in politics a long time," he replies. "Society changes. Your views mature. I wouldn't say that I have fundamentally altered my perspective."

We meet in the communal sitting-room at the Old White Lion in the small Yorkshire village of Haworth, close to the parsonage which was home to the Brontë sisters. We both checked in to the small hotel this morning, but Cook couldn't see me until now - it's late afternoon - because, as his assistant had warned me, "He has so much work to do." Actually what he's been doing all day is striding alone across Top Withins, the forbidding stretch of moorland reputed to have inspired Wuthering Heights. It's an arduous seven-mile hike, the more so today because of snow on the hills.

"What were you brooding about, up there?"

"I can't claim to have been having great thoughts. One of the things about having snow up to your knees is that it is hard to have your mind on anything more than how you are going to get up the next ridge."

"You did recently write that you don't enjoy heat - that you are 'never happier than when I feel the crunch of snow under my boots'."

"That's right. I like snow. Snow doesn't bother me."

This honest terrain is his natural habitat, Cook seems to be saying, with the inference that he pulls on his battered old boots with the same sense of joy Tony Blair feels when he slips into a virgin pair of Italian beach sandals; "the crunch of snow" is Cook's favourite ambient noise in the same way that Blair's is the whirr of the filter pump in somebody else's swimming pool.

Cook's every instinct is the antithesis of New Labour. There are certain politicians who greet strangers like old friends, with an enthusiasm that is almost canine in its intensity - a strategy which, while entirely bogus, is undeniably reassuring. The member for Livingston has no time for such hypocrisies. He is diffident, reserved, and makes little eye contact. When he sees a new face his instinct is to scrutinise rather than flatter; at the same time there is a certain distraction about his manner. The general feeling is one of being assessed by a headmaster who is secretly participating, via an earpiece, in a demanding game of long-distance chess.

Cook, 58, has come to Yorkshire in his new role as leader of Labour's campaign to win back Muslim voters - a constituency whose support for the party, according to one poll, has halved since the invasion of Iraq. The increasingly alarming consequences of this military adventure, which have destroyed the Prime Minister's personal standing with many British Muslims, have only enhanced their respect for Robin Cook. His resignation over Iraq, when he was Leader of the House, in March 2003, underlined the vacillation of his fellow-sceptics in the Labour Party, and still radiates as one of the very few recent acts of principle in the pragmatic culture which prevails at Westminster. There was something magnificently old-fashioned about the way Cook went, like a Test cricketer tucking his bat under his arm and walking without waiting for an appeal, as some once did.

With local MP Ann Cryer, another leading figure in the anti-war campaign, we drive to nearby Keighley, where Cook has a meeting * with Muslim leaders in a community centre. If he's not quite mobbed, as he has been elsewhere, he gets a deeply respectful welcome. Questions from our hosts convey not so much anger at British action in Iraq, as bewildered disillusion. At one point, a boy of eight wanders up to Cook.

"What is it," he asks the former foreign secretary, "that you do?"

"Well," says Cook, with no hint of condescension in his voice. "I am in politics. I used to be in the Government, but I am not there any more. So now I go to the Government and give them advice. Sometimes they listen to me," he explains, "and sometimes they don't."

We set off for a local school, where Cook addresses a packed assembly hall. After he resigned, he tells his audience, he was walking down the Strand. "There was a tramp lying in a doorway. He was one of my compatriots, from Scotland, and I instantly recognised that he was in that condition in which it is convenient to lie down. As I went past, he said: 'You... you're great when you resign. You should do it more often.' It is not certain," he adds, "that Tony Blair will give me another chance."

Cook is traditionally ridiculed for his appearance: he's been called a gnome, a pixie and, perhaps most woundingly, "Neil Kinnock's hair bank". If Tony Blair, with his fixed smile and bouffant, resembles the models in the faded 1970s posters that still hang in some barbers' shops, Cook's features might have been taken from one of Arthur Rackham's illustrations for Peter Pan, where the trees have gnarled and weather-beaten faces. His voice, though, has none of the grisly affectation which so often makes his party leader sound like a man playing the Duke in an amateur dramatic society's production of a history play, arriving in the last scene to assure his subjects that all will be well. Cook's intonation suggests intelligence, perception, and absolute sincerity.

To the point that you almost believe him when he declares, as he often does these days, that he has 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 insists. "We were told that invading Iraq would be a blow against terrorism. There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we invaded it, and created the perfect conditions for al-Qa'ida to thrive: open borders, poor security, and a population with resentment."

The audience's mood alternates between admiration for Cook and resentment at the Cabinet he left. "I didn't leave Labour because I don't believe in Labour," one woman says, to applause. "I left because I despise Tony Blair."

"Tony Blair is not the Labour Party," Cook replies. "I disagree with Tony Blair. But I am hanged if I am going to leave the party for Tony Blair to run it."

"He runs it like a one-man show," the woman responds.

"Nobody needs to tell me about the way he runs the Cabinet," Cook says, urging others not to defect to the Liberals and "give Tony a clear run".

"How can we show him we are disillusioned," the same questioner goes on, "if we don't defect?"

"It is a bit disloyal of me to say this," Cook replies, "but there are many ways. Write to your MP. Write to the press. This is a government that monitors the media very closely."

Watching footage from Iraq, Cook says, "I have been torn between weeping and anger - especially when I hear people say that we have liberated Fallujah by emptying it of its people and leaving it desolate. You will have seen the appalling images of the soldiers charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners. They are worth 1,000 recruiting officers to al-Qa'ida."

Speaking with no notes and, for much of the time, no microphone, Cook delivers one of the most memorable political speeches I have ever seen, on either side of the Atlantic.

When it's over, he visibly relaxes. We drive to a local Indian, where we share a table with a trade-union official and a manic 80-year-old Glaswegian in a kilt. The two men are worried that a collapse in the Islamic vote in Keighley will be a godsend for the BNP. Cook listens, offering occasional advice, over a pint of bitter.

The atmosphere is relaxed, convivial, and an illustration of how, at a local level, Labour has remained unaffected by the posturing egotism that overtakes many at Westminster.

Away from a stage, Cook is an unusual politician in that he tends to remain silent when he has nothing to say. When he does speak, he almost never uses contractions (always the more formal "it is", not "it's") and he's always talking about something - politics, his passion for riding and horse racing, his two Scotty dogs, or the narrative technique of Dickens. (As a young man, he abandoned a PhD on serialisation in the Victorian novel.)

Cook talks eloquently about how Dickens would alter the ending of a plot-line at the last minute, in the light of public reaction to the previous instalment. On one occasion, he says, the novelist, overhearing a stranger speculating on the conclusion of a forthcoming episode, remarked: "I wonder if he would have spoken with such confidence, had he known it was not yet written."

His fondness for speaking about concrete issues, and lack of small talk, may help explain why he tends to inspire respect rather than warmth, and how he has become close to the racing tipster and recent Big Brother contestant John McCririck - who says he has no friends but shares and informs Cook's passion for National Hunt Racing

Back in the Old White Lion lounge, towards midnight, Cook talks to me over coffee. I suspect he would have ordered whisky, but remembers how his first wife Margaret (disappointed after he left her for his then secretary, and current wife, Gaynor Regan, in 1997) publicly accused him of over-indulgence.

It's a curious aspect of British politics, I suggest, that, whereas the smallest school extension, or hospital ward, or item of university funding, is rigorously costed, such transparency never extends to munitions. He was foreign secretary - how much has this war cost?

"They are never exactly straightforward about that," he replies. "I attended one meeting where Tony said: 'Iraq will not be like Afghanistan. With the oil revenues, this war will pay for itself.' Well," Cook adds, with feeling, "the hell it has.

"Think of the fuss over tuition fees," he adds. "What was that argument over £1bn? You ask me what this war has cost. The usual estimate is around £6bn." That figure, Cook indicates, is at the conservative end of the scale, and the first instalment in an open-ended commitment.

He refers to "certain members of the Bush administration" as "deluded and dangerous".

"Has there ever been a US administration with a lower level of competence?"

"I'm not sure it has to do with competence. This is a highly ideological administration. The overwhelming concern of most US governments has been to further America's interest. This one has pursued policies which are plainly against the interests of America, and they have done it for ideological reasons. That is unusual, in American history. And the nub of all that is not the President. It is Dick Cheney. As Europeans," he continues, "we are unaccustomed to dealing with an administration in which the Vice President is more powerful than the President."

In his time as Foreign Secretary, Cook met Cheney (who, among other distinctions, opposed the release of Nelson Mandela.)

"That was one of the most bizarre meetings I have ever had. It was obvious that he bitterly resented this European having wormed his way into his diary. I would put forward a proposition, such as: 'Do you think that further negotiation might prove effective?' to which Cheney would reply: 'Nope.'"

At which point, Cook recalls, "I would say something like: 'Do you feel we could address this difficulty by means of existing protocol?'

'Nope.'

"And so it went on. I had no problem with him not liking me. I would have been worried if Cheney had liked me. To that extent Tony was right to move me from the Foreign Office. I couldn't have gone on having conversations like that for another three years."

Does he still support Blair?

"Tony Blair is the leader of the Labour Party," he says, "and I will always support the leader of the Labour Party."

It sounds convincing enough, until you think that this profession of loyalty could also apply to a crested newt, should it have the misfortune to be elected to high office. Cook's real feelings about Blair are perhaps most clearly indicated when I mention the tragic death of his predecessor, John Smith, in May 1994.

"Tragic is the right word," Cook says. "It was a great turning point. I have not the slightest doubt that, had John not died, we would have won the election and won comfortably. I don't know whether he would have had as big a majority as Tony Blair, but I am pretty confident that he would have done more with power."

Cook's remarks echo the tone of his recent memoirs, The Point of Departure. A masterclass in understatement, it's written in the meas- ured tone of a decent man who feels pity, rather than anger, for his enemies.

On one occasion Cook recalls Blair assuring him of his support with the phrase: "This time I really mean it," six words which, given his character as it emerges from this journal, might serve as an appropriate inscription on the Prime Minister's tombstone.

"The problem with Tony," Cook writes, "is that he has such an exaggerated respect for those who are successful that he is susceptible to mistaking their arguments of self-interest for the national interest."

I have to leave Haworth at five the following morning - a shame, Cook tells me later, because when this intensely private man came down to breakfast, anticipating a tranquil start to the day before slipping quietly away, unnoticed, a dozen fellow-diners converged on his table, eager for news.

"It was a while," he says, "before I discovered that every one of them was a town crier."

He has known worse. After he left his first wife, she published her own memoirs, A Slight and Delicate Creature. Margaret Cook, a consultant haematologist, was married to the politician for 28 years; they have two grown-up sons. She bears some physical resemblance to Mary Archer but, unlike her fellow scientist, failed to recognise a good opportunity to remain silent when she saw one.

Her laboured prose style, combined with the ample details of her own autobiography (in addition to its keen focus on dressage, the book revisits her Grade 8 piano exams and a German poetry-reading competition) mean that the only memorable passages are her embittered assaults on Cook.

The crucial allegations are as follows: that he wore suede chaps, dumped a good woman en route to Boston, and has "a tendency to smash up his car" but little relish for DIY. Cook is also revealed as a poor washer-up who snores but sleeps around, "does not have a wallet", bins leather gloves he is given for Christmas, and likes whisky when he is on - and sometimes off - a horse. "Alas, [ Alas?]" the first Mrs Cook writes, "I once found him flat out on the dining-room floor with a brandy bottle."

It's a pattern of behaviour that will con- firm some male readers in the view that Robin Cook is their natural representative at the seat of power.

The suggestion that he might be a drunk is not taken seriously today. "The Commons is a small place," one senior commentator told me. "When it comes to MPs who have problems with alcohol, you hear a lot of names mentioned. Robin Cook's is not among them."

He has, however, acquired a reputation as somebody who doesn't allow beauty to pass unnoticed. While writing this article I went to a dinner where I was seated next to a woman who told me how Cook had twice asked her to "come over and see my Scotties" - the kind of invitation which (while no impropriety was suggested) he never extended to me. "He won't do anything," his assistant had told me, "at his home."

At our second meeting, in an office at Westminster, I suggest that it can't have been easy for a man of Cook's sensibilities to handle the publicity that followed his separation - like the Sun front page that asked women: "Would you sleep with this man?" (791 said they would.)

"I never rated the Sun enough to be troubled by it."

"Is it legitimate for voters to worry over the marital fidelity of a politician?"

"The voters must decide for themselves. They live in the real world in a way the editors of some tabloids appear not to."

"Don't get me wrong," I tell him "If you were discovered in a suite at the Savoy with a zebra and Pamela Anderson, it wouldn't bother me."

"I think it might bother Gaynor."

Robert Cook - known by the diminutive Robin since he was a boy - was born in Bellshill, a coal town just east of Glasgow. He spent his early years in Aberdeen where his father, Peter, was a teacher. When Robin was 14, Peter Cook was appointed to the prestigious * Royal High School in Edinburgh; his son came with him, and immediately excelled.

"When did you realise you were bright?"

Cook hesitates.

"I came from an academic background. I was expected to do well."

He considered becoming a Presbyterian minister but his faith, like his academic ambitions, was overwhelmed by his political career. Cook entered Parliament as an atheist, aged 28, in 1974.

An only child, Cook has said that he considers himself "shy". I tell him that I don't think I've ever met a public figure who didn't privately consider themselves shy, and that includes Michael Winner, Steven Berkoff, and Lord Archer.

"Perhaps introverted," he says, "would be a better word."

He is unquestionably more at ease when skewering an opponent in the familiar confines of the debating chamber than when posing for a photograph. An architect of Labour's highly praised, if unsuccessful, 1987 election campaign, Cook displayed his true brilliance as a parliamentarian in the late 1980s, as Shadow Health Secretary.

His debating skills destroyed John Moore, Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, so comprehensively that Margaret Thatcher divided the two briefs. (Cook continued to handle both.) Another bravura performance - over the Scott Report on arms sales to Iraq in 1996 - confirmed his reputation as a devastating counterpuncher (who, some colleagues whispered, might be short on political vision).

It's a perception barely supported by his record as Foreign Secretary. Appointed following Labour's landslide victory in May 1997, Cook was in trouble within 77 days, not for having too little vision, but too much. He shows no sign of regretting his attempt to implement a foreign policy with "an ethical dimension", though he does deny using the phrase.

"I believe a politician should speak up for justice," Cook tells me. "And for the oppressed. If another country is conducting actions that will increase tension, we should tell them to back off."

Life at the Foreign Office had been so much simpler before Cook arrived, in the days when self interest had been its overriding principle. This was especially true in the area of arms sales. Under Cook, the FO found itself in the position of a procurer whose prostitute - having built up a lucrative and varied international clientele - had suddenly begun to turn down wealthy punters, some regulars.

The result was a series of supposed gaffes involving weapon sales to regimes with a questionable human-rights record. Most related to contracts signed before Labour took office, but Cook shouldered the blame for the arms supplied to the rebels in Sierra Leone, the Hawk jets to Indonesia and the spare parts for Zimbabwe's air force. These affairs - in which he received rather less support than he might have hoped from Tony Blair - have somehow eclipsed Cook's more substantial achievements, notably his leading role in bringing peace to Kosovo.

"Robin Cook was the most able Foreign Secretary I have ever dealt with," says one senior NGO figure who dealt with him over arms sales. "But if you start trying to oppose the vested interest of the Ministry of Defence, you have problems, believe me."

"The MOD has a problem," Cook says, "in that the people who assess applications for an arms export licence are the very same individuals who act as sponsors of those industries. But we did make the export-licence regime far tougher. If you want to get Britain out of the arms trade altogether, that's a different question."

At the Foreign Office, as elsewhere, people say Cook was admired, rather than loved.

"Two or three years running I was top of the poll for the Shadow Cabinet," he replies. "That doesn't happen if you are disliked."

One former colleague, who worked closely with Cook at the FO, says he was "very difficult towards his staff. Pretty harsh."

"Harsh?"

"Bolshy. Rude. He didn't listen. That kind of thing. He once took a brief he'd been given for a European Council - this great big folder, lovingly prepared for him by the department - and chucked it across the room, saying: 'I do not want this shit.'"

Few were sorry, the former associate recalled, when Cook was fired from the Foreign Office, "because he was so bloody rude to people. I wasn't sorry." That said, he added, "it was widely recognised - even by those who didn't like him - that he was a very, very good Foreign Secretary. When he was sacked, there was immense surprise in overseas ministries, because he was so highly respected, and perceived to be doing an excellent job. But Blair didn't fire Cook over his competence. Blair fired Cook because he wasn't 'One of Us'. Blair fired Cook because he didn't play the game."

"You have a reputation for being high-handed, and short-tempered," I suggest to Cook.

"I can honestly say that I don't recognise that criticism of myself."

"I've always assumed that anybody who reaches a certain level in politics," I tell him, "has to be ruthless; somebody who is - in common parlance - a bit of a bastard."

"Well," he replies, "you have to have objectives, and be determined in securing them. If I didn't have that sense of putting principle first, I would never have resigned. Having said that, I cannot recall much in the way of occasions when I displayed temper at the Foreign Office."

"So you never hurled a dossier across the room, referring to it as 'shit'?"

"Never. Why would I do that?"

Whether he threw that folder or not, I admit to being one of those people who might vote for the Labour Party if Cook was leading it.

"I will not discourage you," he says, "from repeating that remark."

It's been repeatedly suggested that he can never be prime minister because of his appearance. "Plastic surgery," somebody once said, "has not advanced that far."

"Do you think you look weird?"

"No. This body I inhabit happens to be the one I have been in for the last 58 years. And - now I come to think of it - I've grown quite fond of it, actually."

For the moment, Cook says, he is enjoying the relative lack of pressure. "As Foreign Secretary," he says, "you are lucky to get five hours' sleep. If you see your partner to say 'hello' before you get into bed, you are fortunate."

A new spouse is sometimes believed to alter a politician's outlook on life. "Baby Doc" Duvalier and Robert Mugabe - admittedly not natural soulmates of Cook's - are cited as examples.

"Has Gaynor changed you? You've said that: 'She taught me emotional intelligence.' What does that mean?"

"Gaynor taught me how to understand and respect other people's feelings. Because I was a high attainer, academically, I was in a culture where respect was proportionate to the merits of success. Looking back, I do not think I gave sufficient attention to how other people felt. Gaynor is extremely intuitive, very sensitive to people's emotions. I have learnt from that."

When I tell Cook that I'm not sure what he means by this, he tells me again, in pretty much identical terms. What I think he's saying is that Gaynor has made him less of an elitist, and possibly less preoccupied with ambition.

Just before he resigned from the Cabinet, Cook told Blair that colleagues had been dropping in to check on him so often that he thought he was on suicide watch. And, in a curious way, resignation has allowed him to experience privileges normally reserved for statesmen who are dead. Newspapers that vilified him now praise him. Political opponents treat him with the respect he deserves. Among some supporters, he has been elevated to a kind of sainthood.

All of which might be very pleasing in the short term, but I'm not convinced that the idea of resurrection has been totally banished from Cook's mind. If there's one theme his conversation keeps coming back to, it's foreign affairs. His work in the Islamic community is just a means of addressing what he rightly calls "the big issue for the 21st century" - peace in the Middle East - from outside the Cabinet.

One much-circulated rumour is that, should Gordon Brown become leader, Cook will be back in a senior Cabinet post. (This despite the well-publicised acrimony which has coloured the men's relationship in the past.)

"Firstly I have no ambition to do that. Secondly I am not angling for it. And thirdly, Gordon and I have never discussed that."

"But you're on good terms with Brown now."

"I am. That doesn't mean he would offer me a Cabinet post."

"If he did, would you accept?"

"I am not keen on it."

Another of Cook's possible futures is depicted on the cover of his memoirs - a picture of the politician, his back to the camera, walking away, to spend more time riding horses, and climbing Top Withins. But he is still clutching his briefcase. And even the title of The Point of Departure is ambiguous; it's hard to know whether it refers to the end of Robin Cook's career, or the start of a new political journey. If he has disappeared from the front benches forever, Parliament will have lost one of the most gifted, original and principled figures of the post-War era. As regards his immediate plans, Cook himself does seem genuinely afflicted by that condition that so rarely affects seasoned politicians - honest doubt. But then - as Charles Dickens showed him, many years ago - even the best of us can't always be sure how our story will end.