LONDON, 18 March 2003 — Robin Cook, who resigned from the British Cabinet yesterday over the Iraqi crisis, is a tenacious political fighter whose undoubted intellect has not always been matched by diplomatic finesse.

The 57-year-old Scot took over the Foreign Office in 1997 with a pledge to inject a new “ethical dimension” to foreign policy, but his first year in the job was marked by personal embarrassment and questions over his judgment. Within weeks he abruptly ended his 28-year marriage when a newspaper threatened to reveal he was having an affair with his secretary Gaynor Regan.

His ex-wife Margaret hit back with a devastating personal attack on him in which she revealed intimate details of their troubled love life and alleged Cook drank heavily. She described one incident in 1987 when she said Cook passed out on the floor of a hotel with a brandy bottle.

Cook was later blamed for marring a visit by Queen Elizabeth to Pakistan and India by suggesting a possible mediation by Britain in the Kashmir dispute. The remarks infuriated India and the queen’s visit degenerated into a series of ill-tempered spats between British and Indian officials. He also became embroiled in controversy when, during a trip to Israel, he visited a Jewish settlement in Arab East Jerusalem, breaking an informal agreement with the Israelis.

But Cook’s fortunes turned in 1999 when he played a prominent role in NATO’s successful campaign to force Serbian troops out of Kosovo. He later listed “defending Kosovo” as one of his greatest achievements. It was not enough, however, to save him from demotion in June 2001, shortly after Prime Minister Tony Blair won a second term in office. Cook became the Labour Party’s leader in the House of Commons, where his sharp wit and intellectual self-confidence were perhaps better employed than in the corridors of diplomacy.

He is widely regarded as a superb debater with a formidable intellect.

A prickly man with a small circle of close friends, he refers good-humoredly to his lack of “classic good looks”. Newspaper columnists with a cruel streak have compared him to a garden gnome.

“He stands with his chest thrown out and one leg forward like a scruffy bantam cock,” a newspaper journalist once wrote of him. “(He is) so confidently aggressive that you expect the forward foot to have a spur on the heel with which to rake the carpet.” Cook is fanatical about horse racing. When asked which book he would take with him if he were banished to a desert island, he chose the National Hunt Form Book, a guide to horse racing in Britain.

Once a committed Eurosceptic, Cook has emerged in recent years as one of the most pro-European members of Blair’s Cabinet.

He caused a storm in 2000 when he said British membership of the euro was, in the end, “inevitable” — going way beyond Blair’s cautious support in principle for joining the single currency if the economics are right and subject to a referendum.

Robert Finlayson Cook was born on Feb. 28, 1946, and has two children from his first marriage. In 1998 he married his former secretary Regan. The son of a chemistry teacher, he was educated at Aberdeen Royal Grammar School and Edinburgh University, where he studied English literature and began a career in Labour politics. He was first elected to Parliament in 1974.

AFP adds: His resignation protesting Blair’s support for a US-led war on Iraq was in line, he would claim, with his principled stance toward politics. Though it was later mocked as unworkable, Cook’s ambition of pursuing an “ethical foreign policy” did bear some fruit — arms exports to some nations ceased and Britain wrote off some of its Third World debt. A razor-sharp politician who was seen as standing for the values of the traditional left and once tipped as a leader of the Labour Party.