Robin Cook

The two most contentious issues in Labour politics in my adult lifetime have been unilateral nuclear disarmament, which the party advocated for much of the 1980s with catastrophic electoral consequences, and the Iraq War. On both issues, the late Robin Cook took the wrong side. He told the Party Conference in 1983, after the worst election result for Labour since the 1930s:

We failed first of all because our policies came across as overwhelmingly negative. Every doorstep I stopped on knew we were against the bomb. Most of them thought we were also against defence. They did not know what we were for. [Quoted in Peter Jones, America and the British Labour Party (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997), p. 192.]

This was a misconception that did Labour substantial damage. In fact the electorate had a pellucid understanding of the distinctive feature of Labour policy, which was that Britain should give up nuclear weapons while getting nothing in return. That proved impossible to sell. The policy was, as Gerald Kaufman declared (at a post-election Fabian meeting at my university), intellectually disreputable.

I recount this not to criticise Cook but to acknowledge his political skill. He was one of the few Labour politicians able to argue the case for the party’s then defence policies cogently and with intellectual weight. On the Iraq War, the manner of his resignation from the Government merited respect from those who disagreed with him just as the manner of Clare Short’s non-resignation earned her the derision of those who did agree with her. But most significant for Cook's political reputation will be, in my view, his assertion of foreign policy with an ethical dimension (not, as he is often misquoted as saying, an ‘ethical foreign policy’).

I strongly support this notion. Ethical standards cannot be everything in foreign policy because policymakers have to make trade-offs among desirable goals and priorities. (It is the principal weakness of Tony Blair’s view of international affairs, with which I am otherwise highly sympathetic, that he does not say this publicly – that, for example, pressing for democracy in Syria, which is part of a genuine ‘axis of evil’ of Islamist terrorism, is a more urgent task than pressing for it in the even-worse tyranny of North Korea, which is not part of an axis at all.) But they mark an essential distinction between progressive values and a conservative realism that, in disregarding the ideological character of oppressive regimes, is far from being realistic.

Cook, as Foreign Secretary, did fine work in two cases of foreign policy with an ethical dimension: Nato’s repulsion of Serb aggression against the Albanian Kosovars, and the deployment of British troops to Sierra Leone to preserve a suffering people from a peculiarly barbarous set of hand-lopping rebels. These episodes in British public policy are, like so many others, brilliantly and entirely unintentionally illuminated by Tony Benn in his celebrated diaries. In his entry for 16 April 1999, Benn records a debate in the House regarding military action in Kosovo: “Cook made a speech that I thought was odious, just repeating the insults to Milosevic personally and the war-crimes question.”

That sentence alone is worth the price of the entire set of Benn’s volumes. It prefigures the man’s later obsequiousness before Saddam Hussein, and indicates starkly the problem of a reactionary and amoral Left indifferent to the sufferings of tyrannised peoples. Robin Cook was anti-war, but he was not part of that sort of anti-war ‘Left’. That is why I respected him, and value the good he wrought on the international stage.