Diary - 22 March 2003 | The Spectator

One day last August, with the dust-motes swirling in the summer heat, I ran into Robin Cook in a corridor of the House of Commons. The place was almost deserted during the long recess, whose length Cook later truncated as part of the sweeping reforms he brought in when Leader of the House. The Spectator had just published an article by me expressing my misgivings at the prospect of a war on Iraq, and Robin told me he agreed with many of the points I had made. It therefore came as no surprise to me that his own doubts should have surfaced steadily to the point where he resigned from the government. Just as Robin agreed with me, so I agreed with him in many of the arguments he put forward in his masterly Commons resignation speech – his ‘personal statement’ is one of the few specimens of quaint Commons phraseology that Robin unaccountably failed to abolish. I especially empathised with his excoriation of the ghastly President George W. Bush. However, I did not agree with his conclusion that he would vote against the government, since to me Security Council resolution 1441 provides sufficient legal justification for military action. I do not think Robin would have chosen to end his career in front-bench politics to the accompaniment of a standing ovation from the Liberal Democrats, loathing for whose cynical opportunism was widespread on both Labour and Conservative benches on Monday night. I wish that Robin’s reforms had included changes in the rules governing television coverage of the Commons to allow panoramic reaction shots, since it would have been educational for the wider electorate to have seen the giggling and smirking that so often permeated the Liberal Democrat and Scottish Nationalist benches during that tense and sombre evening.