Twenty years ago this evening I sat in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons to watch its departed leader, Robin Cook, deliver what many came to regard as the finest parliamentary speech of its era.
The days leading up to it had been spent in his company preparing for that moment and the resignation that preceded it. It was an event full of mixed emotions and political significance, and it has lost none of its power in the time since.
My own involvement stemmed from the work I had done as Robin’s special adviser before quitting the Foreign Office two years earlier. A few weeks before the speech, he had invited me for a private drink at his official residence, where he confided his intention to resign ahead of the war. Would I help him with the handling? He didn’t want the career prospects of his current advisers to be tainted with rebellion, whereas I was a known troublemaker with nothing to lose. I eagerly accepted.
As soon as it became clear that there would be no UN security council mandate for war, the work began. The first order of business was to strategise his departure. He was determined not to break the crockery on the way out. It wasn’t his style, and would have detracted from the seriousness of the issue, so no flounce out of Downing Street for the TV cameras and no briefing wars. His reasons would be given in parliament because his colleagues deserved to hear them directly and before anyone else.
Then there was the speech to write, with long conversations and rewrites stretching over days. As usual, the final version was crafted entirely by himself, with only one line of my original draft surviving the final edit. It was this care and pride in his own words that gave his voice its unique force of authority.
What I recall most about the moment of delivery was the emotion of the occasion and the mixture of sadness and relief that Robin carried with him on that day. Although it doesn’t show so well on film, his physical demeanour and the crackle in his voice conveyed it clearly to those who were present. It explains the burst of spontaneous applause that greeted it, in breach of parliamentary convention.
The speech is remembered for its moral courage and intellectual clarity, but did it make any difference? As I met Robin on leaving the chamber, news came through that Clare Short would be staying in the cabinet (she would not leave for another two months) and any lingering hope that MPs would rebel in sufficient numbers fell away.
He couldn’t stop an unnecessary war and the horrific suffering it unleashed – something he felt as a personal failure – yet his intervention undoubtedly changed our understanding of its aftermath. Above all, it removed the excuse that the false pretext for regime change was the result of a simple intelligence failure. As he showed in his speech, it was possible to read the assessments produced by our intelligence services and reach the correct conclusion that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
I had seen the same assessments until 2001 and assumed from the way ministers were talking that new intelligence must have been received post-9/11 to raise the threat level. Robin was quick to disabuse me of that notion at our February meeting. It was only later that I discovered why. The visitor before me had been the chairman of the joint intelligence committee, John Scarlett, making one final, unsuccessful attempt to present the case for supporting the conflict. The exchange is recorded in Robin’s diary. Unlike others, he would not subordinate his judgment to self-deception and the expediency of remaining in office.
The legacy of the speech survives as a benchmark of political integrity. We are also left with many what-ifs. Robin was one of the few politicians to emerge from the Iraq war with their reputation enhanced, so much so that he was tipped for a return to cabinet under a different leader. My sense is that the great personal happiness he experienced after his resignation would have made him reluctant to accept, but we’ll never know because his life was cut short at the age of 59, only two years later.
What we undoubtedly missed with his loss was the authority he would have brought as an elder statesman with something to say about the tumultuous events of the last two decades. Ahead of most, he was already troubled by Russia’s lurch towards authoritarianism under Putin. Perhaps his wise counsel would have prevented Labour making so many errors in opposition. As a staunch defender of the UK’s place in Europe, he might have been able to reach the voters that other leaders of the remain campaign could not in 2016.
What endures in the absence of this is the example of someone who was willing to make a personal sacrifice in the service of truth. It is worth remembering, now more than ever.
David Clark was special adviser to Robin Cook at the Foreign Office from 1997 to 2001