Diary – 22 March 2003

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.