Managing Decline #31: Robin Cook

British Foreign Secretaries of the Twentieth Century

Just four weeks now until the forma publication date of my new book is “Managing Decline: British Foreign Secretaries of the Twentieth Century”. Though Amazon seem determined to hold out until then, it is already available on the websites of a number of retailers, including Waterstones, Hatchards, Blackwells and Politicos. I see they are today showing out of stock again, but that’s a temporary hitch – they’ll have the book again in a few days.

The eBook is also available – most easily found on Amazon.

The book covers the thirty-one men who held the position, from Lansdowne to Robin Cook, providing whole life profiles, but as a taster have been posting regular extracts covering just their time in the role. Today, we have reached the last of my subjects: Robin Cook. (I will however be drawing together some conclusions over a further two or three posts – you’re not done with me yet).

Robin Cook was the finest Parliamentarian of his age. First returned to Westminster at a young age, he had to wait more than two decades for his first taste of office. Cook’s time as Foreign Secretary had more than its share of controversy, but he was one of the more significant incumbents of the second half of the century.

When Tony Blair became Labour leader in 1994, Cook was moved over to the position of Shadow Foreign Secretary. This was ostensibly a promotion but removed Cook from domestic and especially economic policy making, which was believed to be at Gordon Brown’s insistence. This was a frustrating period for Cook, now effectively shut out of the decision-making (as indeed was everyone aside from the increasingly centralised leadership). Cook’s reluctant acquiescence in the party’s direction neither gained Blair’s trust nor satisfied his natural supporters that he was – as the Guardian put it – “custodian of the party’s conscience”.

After Labour’s resounding success at the 1997 general election, Cook went (as expected) to the Foreign Office. Almost the only thing that might have denied him the job would have been a narrow win that forced Labour to seek a coalition with the Liberal Democrats – in which eventuality Paddy Ashdown could have been Foreign Secretary (which would have been ironic given that Cook had been the leading advocate of collaboration with the LibDems).

Cook was fifty-one and this was his first taste of ministerial office. Such a lack of experience was the norm for the new government after Labour’s eighteen years of opposition.[1] But whilst a number of his colleagues would struggle to find their feet, it was Cook who would endure arguably the most torrid year of them all despite his diligent preparation. His officials struggled to come to terms with the combination of his apparent eagerness to enjoy the trappings of office (ordering the ornate gates that fronted onto Downing Street to be opened for his arrival – it was a struggle to find the key) and his informality (unheard of, he found his way to the staff canteen and queued with a tray for his lunch).

One of the first decisions of the new government was over the operational independence of the Bank of England. Blair reluctantly informed Cook and Prescott shortly in advance, but there was no question of consulting them. Thus the tone was set from the start: highly centralised decision making – a departure from Cabinet government almost without precedent in peacetime. Cook and Prescott were ostensibly part of the ‘big four’, but that did not make them insiders.

For Cook, this style of government was particularly difficult: from the start Blair enjoyed his own role on the world stage, often failing to make even cursory efforts to align his views with his Foreign Secretary. This tendency only increased over time: the foreign policy machinery in No. 10 was upgraded in 2000 with the appointment of Sir Stephen Wall (ambassador to Brussels) to a new position as adviser on the EU and Sir David Manning (ambassador to NATO) as adviser on non-EU matters. The make-up of the Foreign Office ministerial team brought home Cook’s status in the hierarchy. His suggestions for the position of Minister for Europe were rejected and the role went to Doug Henderson, a Brown man; another of his junior ministers was Liz Symons, who was close to Blair. This pattern of Brown and Blair placemen was repeated across Whitehall departments.

Cook was impatient to make a difference and determined to get off to a flying start (combined with his irascible arrogance, this made him – at least initially – unpopular with his officials). Cook’s efforts to modernise the Foreign Office – greater openness, more diverse recruitment – were not easy for those comfortable with the status quo. His first month of office saw a flurry of announcements: the adoption of the ‘social chapter’ of Maastricht (from which Major had secured an opt-out); the ending of the controversial ban on trade union membership at GCHQ; and the introduction of a complete ban on the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of anti-personnel landmines (joining an international initiative that the Major government had been reluctant to support). The Foreign Policy Centre was established as a new think tank (and still survives). Cook travelled to Paris and Bonn to emphasise the government’s desire for more positive relations with Europe. In Washington, he established good personal relations with his opposite number (Madeleine Albright) and at the United Nations in New York he called for stronger environmental regulation.

What turned out to be the pivotal event in Cook’s busy first weeks was a presentation to invited guests at the Foreign Office on 12^th May. Following a slick video setting out Britain’s role in the world – an outward-facing version of Blair’s ‘cool Britannia’ imagery – Cook took to the lectern to deliver the department’s first-ever mission statement. He placed government policy firmly in Labour’s internationalist tradition – in terms Ramsay MacDonald might have welcomed – in saying that “national interest cannot be defined only by narrow realpolitik”. This was a clear departure from the Hurd-Rifkind approach.

However, the phrase that stuck out from Cook was when he said that “our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension”. The carefully couched phraseology counted for nothing: Cook’s words were immediately translated by the press to mean that Britain was adopting an ethical foreign policy. This had two consequences. The minor one was that it infuriated his predecessors – for whom it implied that their policy had been unethical. More seriously, and rather like the previous government’s ‘back to basics’ initiative, it set up an unachievable standard that would come back to haunt Cook. His mishandling of the issue would largely define his tenure.

Cook’s approach was fleshed out in a further speech in July, setting out twelve points under the title of human rights. The first practical test came quickly enough, directly on one of those points: the supply of arms to authoritarian regimes. Specifically, the issue was on the delivery of an arms package to Indonesia that had been signed the previous year. This brought an added piquancy: Cook had fulminated against arms sales to Indonesia more than two decades previously and he had more recently been livid to find a photograph of himself shaking hands with President Suharto in a Foreign Office brochure, which he assumed to be a deliberate slight. The obstacles to cancelling an existing contract were, however, too great and the sales went ahead. The result, as campaigners put it, was that there were “worrying signs that there is a considerable gap between policy and practice”. Cook had never promised that the contract would be cancelled, but he made the mistake of dropping some heavy hints that it might be; the result was that his high ideals appeared to have been emasculated from the start. An early day motion criticising the sales was supported by 136 MPs – mostly Labour and clearly far more than the hard left ‘usual suspects’, this indicates early disappointment amongst Cook’s natural supporters.

As for future arms sales, Cook lacked the political clout to bring about the changes he might have wanted in the face of defence industry lobbying. His attempts to do so brought him into conflict with both the realpolitik view of Jonathan Powell, the chief of staff at No. 10, and the pro-industry instincts of the Prime Minister. Cook did achieve greater transparency on arms sales by establishing an arms trade register. However, analysis after the first two years of the new government would note the lack of systematic oversight of arms export licences and conclude that a smaller proportion had been refused under Labour than under the Conservatives.

Arms sales were, of course, not the only dimension by which the ethics of foreign policy could be measured. Cook’s support for the establishment of the International Criminal Court (to hold states accountable for illegal actions) was a notable success in the face of American opposition and a distinct lack of enthusiasm from his own Prime Minister. However, controversy about the ethics of his policy continued to dog Cook, from his willingness to meet his Chinese counterparts in the summer of 1997 (when their threat to send troops into Hong Kong ahead of the handover was still on the table) to British support of American sanctions against Iraq and the use of strategic bombing to enforce the no-fly zone in early 2001. Clearly frustrated at being beaten with a rod of his own making, Cook tried to distance himself from his own initiative, telling an interviewer in 1998 “I never said there would be an ethical foreign policy”.

The immediate reason for Cook’s irritation was the Sandline affair. This involved the shipment of arms by Sandline – a British company – to Sierra Leone to aid the ex-President who had been deposed in a coup. This was in clear contravention of a United Nations resolution. It was a messy business that dragged on through the summer of 1998. Although Cook (and his ministers) had done nothing wrong – as the subsequent enquiry found – there were plenty of signs of an apparent lack of grip: the absence of transparency over the involvement of officials; the failure to brief ministers; the grudging response to the Customs and Excise investigation; and an inept performance by the Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir John Kerr, in front of the Commons select committee. Kerr was found by the enquiry to have “failed in his duty to ministers” – this was sharp criticism indeed and although he survived, his relationship with Cook never recovered. To the Prime Minister (with his gift for getting to the heart of an issue), Sierra Leone should have been a good news story: the democratically elected President Kabbah had been returned to power. He was infuriated that Cook had allowed matters to spiral so badly out of control.

Sandline had obvious parallels with the arms-to-Iraq scandal, and Cook had made too many enemies over the years for them not to enjoy his discomfort – those on the opposition benches were the least of his problems. There had been other missteps too. Private remarks were made when accompanying the Queen on a visit to India in late 1997, suggesting that Britain might mediate in the dispute over Kashmir. This caused a major row (all the more so for the unforgivable sin of dragging the Crown into politics). A visit by Cook to Israel in the following spring – as part of a renewed peace initiative – went even more badly off track: the Israelis objected vehemently to Cook’s meeting with a PLO official and responded by cutting short his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu and cancelling a dinner. In both the Indian and Israeli cases there were nuances. Any fault was far from being entirely Cook’s, yet they added to a growing sense that the Foreign Secretary was accident-prone. And, as so often before, Cook was let down by his poor personal relations. The ongoing feud with Gordon Brown and repeated rows with Claire Short at the new Department for International Development (yet again, someone naturally in tune with Cook’s world view) hindered his effectiveness.

By far the greatest damage to Cook’s reputation was, however, entirely of his own making. His marriage to Margaret – who he had met at university – was in difficulties. The pressure of their parallel careers – she had become a successful consultant haematologist – was intense and despite their shared equestrian love, they were drifting apart. She rarely attended political events, although she enjoyed some aspects of being a Foreign Secretary’s wife – invitations to Windsor and Highgrove, and accompanying Cook on his trip to Hong Kong. But by then Cook had been conducting an affair with his secretary (Gaynor Regan) for some time: Margaret had known about it for at least two years and they had suspected for at least a year that the press were sniffing around.

It was on 1^st August 1997, at Heathrow on the way to a holiday, that Cook received a phone call from Alastair Campbell (the Downing Street Press Secretary) telling him that the News of the World were going to publish the story. Campbell’s advice was that they needed ‘clarity’, which Cook accepted, telling Margaret at the airport that the marriage – and the holiday – was off. In the very short-term, Campbell was right: the immediate impact of the story was limited – another political marriage breaking down was not in itself big news. But the price of such brutally insensitive handling was that Margaret became increasingly bitter and would keep up the most harmful of commentaries through 1998. She published her own account of the marriage the following year, exposing Cook to continuing ridicule. There was also a damaging political angle that played out over the next year with the appearance that Cook had tried to secure Gaynor a Foreign Office job. As Cook sought to rebuild his personal and political life he was a diminished figure.

Cook married Gaynor in 1998 and there was a concerted effort to relaunch his career. A new press secretary was recruited from outside the Foreign Office to tighten up the media handling[2] and Cook gave up his beloved tipster column in the Glasgow Herald. Even so he gave serious thought to leaving the Cabinet to take on the position of Scottish First Minister in the new devolved government – that opportunity drifted away through his indecision over the winter. He also considered (but rejected) the vacancy for NATO Secretary-General which in the end went to the Defence Secretary George Robertson. At the same time, it was becoming evident that Peter Mandelson was being groomed as ‘Foreign Secretary in waiting’; Cook may have been a fortunate beneficiary of Mandelson’s enforced resignation at the end of 1998.

More than anything else it was a series of diplomatic successes which rehabilitated Cook. There was decisive action over Iraq where Saddam Hussein was obstructing UN weapons inspectors. It was Cook who took the lead on coordinating America’s allies in supporting further action. After seven years of frustrating negotiation diplomatic relations with Libya were resumed as part of an agreement which saw the suspects for the Lockerbie bombing stand trial in the Netherlands (under Scottish law). And the Iranians were persuaded at least to agree not to pursue (though not formally to lift) the fatwa on the writer Salman Rushdie. Cook closed 1998 with a summit with his opposite number in the French government at St Malo; this was significant both in terms of Anglo-French defence cooperation and in British acceptance of a defence role being played by the EU, a marked reversal of previous British policy.

What Cook himself viewed as one of his most significant achievements was the resolution of the war in Kosovo. After the outbreak of violence, there was every indication that this could have descended into bloodshed every bit as bad as Bosnia. That it did not was due to the lessons learned from the earlier conflict. At the outset (in early 1998), Blair and Cook were both against direct military intervention, and their position was particularly influential because Britain held the EU Presidency; the most tangible step taken at that point was the UN resolution on an arms embargo. By the following spring, the British government’s position had shifted, and they were now at the forefront of calling for military intervention. A sustained bombing campaign and the agreement to use substantial ground forces proved enough to make the Serbs back down, preventing the situation from deteriorating further.

The Labour government had shown itself more interventionist than the Conservatives had been, and the outcome in Kosovo was infinitely better. It was, however, an important step on the road to what had been described as ‘warlike humanitarianism’, a belief in intervention not on the basis of a breach of international law or of the danger to British interests, but because it was morally justified. This became how Blair’s idea of a ‘Third Way’, elastic in a domestic context, acquired an international dimension: national interest governed by international collaboration. On this, Cook and Blair were for the moment in absolute agreement – they would later diverge sharply.

One important ingredient in these successes – Iraq, Libya and Kosovo – was Cook’s close and productive relationship with Madeleine Albright. He found it hard to make the transition to dealing with the Bush administration, which took office at the start of 2001 – unlike Blair, who moved swiftly to become even closer to Bush than he had been to Clinton. Cook got on well with the new Secretary of State, Colin Powell, but Powell was not the real force in the new administration’s foreign policy – he was outmanoeuvred by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who were both suspicious of Cook.

On Europe, the former sceptic Cook became almost an enthusiast. More successfully than most, Cook squared the Atlanticist vs European circle – understanding that Britain’s voice was more likely to be heard in Washington when it was influential in Europe. He did much to improve the tone of Britain’s European contribution – just as Blair carried out his own cultivation of Chirac and Kohl (and later Schroeder) – though the reality was of the Franco-German axis forging ahead and Britain left on the sidelines. The substance of Labour’s European policy was not much changed from the previous Conservative government due to Brown’s effective veto on joining the Euro. To his frustration, Cook was largely shut out of this debate; he had become a convert once he saw that continued exclusion – especially as more countries were signing up – was damaging Britain’s influence. But this had become a particularly sensitive political point where he was caught between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.

The British presidency of the EU in the first half of 1998 was a presentational success – if thin on substance: the Labour government had simply lacked sufficient time since coming into office to plan more effectively. Together, Blair and Cook were an effective combination, especially in those summit negotiations where leaders were unaccompanied by officials: Cook’s command of detail was widely admired. A particular success was the Nice summit in 2000, which agreed the enlargement of the EU to include a number of Eastern European countries and the consequent changes to QMV.

Following the 2001 general election, Cook was – to his surprise and disappointment – moved out of the Foreign Office. There was no single or obvious reason. It was a combination of Blair wanting to resolve the continued tension between the Treasury and Foreign Office especially on the Euro (and failing to summon up the resolve to sack Gordon Brown) and that Cook had proved irritating to Downing Street just too often – a speech during the election on multiculturalism, unexceptional in itself, was typically off message, straying on to a subject No. 10 was anxious to avoid.

Cook was given the option of staying in the government as Lord President and Leader of the Commons. After some hesitation, he accepted the demotion (and there was no attempt to portray it as anything else) and returned to his old passion of constitutional reform. He remained in position for less than two years before resigning in 2003 over the imminent military action against Iraq. For Cook the case had not been made out that there was – as he put it in a memorable resignation speech – an urgent and compelling reason for war, nor was there support for the action in any of the international organisations of which Britain was a leading part – NATO, the UN or the EU.

Despite his resignation, Cook remained a Labour loyalist and there was even a rapprochement with Brown – it became widely believed that he would rejoin the government once Brown became Prime Minister. It was not to be. Cook suffered a heart attack and fell whilst hill walking in Scotland with Gaynor later that summer. He was fifty-nine.

Before coming to power in 1997, Blair had stressed continuity in foreign policy, fully aware of the suspicions held by many voters about some of Labour’s past positions. But the differences from the Conservatives were more than rhetorical. Blair and Cook together understood that the ‘Global Britain’ they wished to promote benefited more than most countries from the established world order. They sought to play a full role in driving the currents in a way that the Conservatives – hidebound by their internal feuds on Europe – had been unable to do. Both Blair and Cook saw the role of ‘values’ in their approach. For Blair, this led to a moralistic tone that harked back to Gladstone.

By the time Cook departed the Foreign Office at the end of New Labour’s first term, the international position could be regarded as a relative success. Relations with both the American administration and Britain’s European partners were improved. It would be later, in the wake of 9/11, that the government became badly unstuck, failing to avoid subservience to Washington and drawing a false lesson from Kosovo about what intervention could achieve.

Cook’s particular contribution was his ethical dimension, and his support for a range of related measures – from the International Criminal Court to the banning of land mines – which Downing Street saw as an unwelcome distraction. It was an important shift and – unlike Owen’s similar move – has never been fully reversed: a former narrow focus on Britain’s interests seems somehow inappropriate in this day and age. This, together with his overdue drive to modernise the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service, makes Cook one of the more significant Foreign Secretaries of the post-Suez half of our subjects.

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[1] Of the 1997 Cabinet, only Margaret Beckett, Jack Cunningham and Gavin Strang had served as even junior ministers in the Callaghan government.

[2] And who – to my pleasant surprise – follows my Substack.