Rob Blackhurst

A few years back I did some leader-writing for the Independent and Independent on Sunday. The experience can be pretty terrifying - especially when asked to write with an hour to spare about something that you've never thought about for more than a few seconds. But occasionally the adrenaline flows, the cogs run smoothly, and it feels like the best job in the world.

This leader on Robin Cook's death was written in a frantic newsroom on a saturday afternoon. The carefully prepared lead of the paper, prepared over days, had to be jettisoned, as news-desks used their contacts in the highland rescue teams to confirm whether the rumours were true that Cook had, in fact, died on a Scottish mountainside. I wrote this piece in about twenty minutes, shouted at all the way, to make the first edition.

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Independent on Sunday Leading Article

Robin Cook was the kind of politician who isn't supposed to succeed these days. His forensic intellectualism, elegant Edinburgh sentences and university professor looks were not exactly drawn from the New Labour manual. He always seemed more comfortable writing an essay on George Bernard Shaw for the Fabian Society than in appearing on a pastel-coloured stage with Blairite ministers. He was a master of the set-piece parliamentary occasion. The two hours that he spent devouring the Scott Inquiry report before destroying a hapless Foreign Office minister at the dispatch box became the stuff of Westminster legend.

Unusually for a politician, he was able to flourish in all stages of political life, making the transition from opposition terrier to model administrator when he was passed the keys to the Foreign Office in 1997. He quickly declared the age of "tea and cucumber sandwiches over", upsetting some of the old guard by setting up a Human Rights Department to champion the ethical causes in the face of hard-nosed geopolitical calculations.

Despite the furore over his "ethical foreign policy" Cook at least set a yardstick by which Britain's policies should be measured. And for a man whose manner was sometimes described as brusque, he had more than his share of diplomatic successes - brokering a deal to try the Libyan suspects of the Lockerbie bombing, improving relations with Iran, and holding a fractious coalition together during the Kosovo war. After almost 20 years of Conservative handbagging, he pioneered the revolutionary British tactic of listening to his European counterparts. In an age where politicians often cling to power, his principled resignation over the Iraq war was notable in that he never showed bitterness towards the cabinet colleagues with whom he disagreed.

When John Smith died in similarly sudden circumstances in 1994, Robin Cook was an early contender for leader of the party. A Labour Party under Cook would have been a very different beast - which is perhaps why he bathed in adulation at party conference.

Cook will be best remembered as a politician who doggedly refused to court popularity. Instead of football and rock music, his leisure interests featured a country squire's mixture of whisky, gambling and horse-racing. Perhaps that is why, in an age of identikit politicians and anaemic soundbites, Cook won a respect far beyond his natural political constituency.