Robin Cook - in Opposition

In Opposition

He became known as a brilliant parliamentary debater, and rose through the party ranks, becoming a frontbench spokesman in 1980, and reaching the Shadow Cabinet in 1987, as Shadow Social Services Secretary. He was campaign manager for Neil Kinnock's successful 1983 bid to become leader of the Labour Party, and was one of the key figures in the modernisation of the Labour Party under Kinnock. He was Shadow Health Secretary (1987–92) and Shadow Trade Secretary (1992–94), before taking on foreign affairs in 1994, the post he would become most identified with (Shadow Foreign Secretary 1994-97, Foreign Secretary 1997-2001).

In 1994, following the death of John Smith, he ruled himself out of contention for the Labour leadership, apparently on the grounds that he was "insufficiently attractive" to be an election winner, although two close family bereavements in the week in which the decision had to be made may have contributed.

Despite his role in modernising the party under Kinnock and Smith, Cook was said to be never fully committed to Blair's "New Labour" project, considering it a step too far to the right.

On 26 February 1996, following the publication of the Scott Report into the 'Arms-to-Iraq' affair, he made a famous speech in response to the then President of the Board of Trade Ian Lang in which he said "this is not just a Government which does not know how to accept blame; it is a Government which knows no shame". His parliamentary performance on the occasion of the publication of the five-volume, 2,000-page Scott Report — which he claimed he was given just two hours to read before the relevant debate, thus giving him three seconds to read every page — was widely praised on both sides of the House as one of the best performances the Commons had seen in years, and one of Cook's finest hours. The government won the vote by a majority of one.

As Joint Chair (alongside Liberal Democrat MP Robert Maclennan) of the Labour-Liberal Democrat Joint Consultative Committee on Constitutional Reform, Cook brokered the 'Cook-Maclennan Agreement' that laid the basis for the fundamental reshaping of the British constitution outlined in Labour's 1997 General Election manifesto. This led to legislation for major reforms including Scottish and Welsh devolution, the Human Rights Act and removing the majority of hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Others have remained elusive so far, such as a referendum on the electoral system and further House of Lords reform. However, in 2011 voters in the United Kingdom were finally given the chance to have their say on replacing the first-past-the-post voting system with the Alternative Vote method in a referendum held on 5th May. On 6th May it was announced that any proposed move to the AV voting system had been rejected by the minority of the electorate who voted by a margin of 67.9% to 32.1%.