Andrew Woodcock, Chris Moncrieff and Chris Lloyd look at the life and career of former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook who died on a Scottish mountain side at a time when high office was again within his grasp.

ROBIN Cook was one of the modern Labour Party's leading thinkers and one of most powerful orators in the House of Commons, who rose to occupy one of the three key offices of state, but dramatically quit the Government in protest over the Iraq War.

After the death of then Labour leader John Smith in 1994, Cook was widely regarded as the party's best political brain. But in an age in which appearance seemed to count for more than ability, he was never seriously in the running as Smith's successor.

Short of stature, with his ginger hair and neatly trimmed beard, Cook himself joked ruefully that he was not suited to leadership of a major political party in a televisual age. Cartoonists gleefully depicted him as a garden gnome.

Despite his undoubted political acumen, Cook was regarded as no more than an indifferent Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister Tony Blair removed him from that post after Labour's 2001 general election victory and ''downgraded'' him to Leader of the Commons.

This was a job which he came to enjoy and in which he was successful and popular on all sides of the House.

Soon after his arrival at the Foreign Office, just after announcing that there would be "an ethical dimension" to British foreign policy, his career suffered a bad jolt when he was involved in a bizarre marital calamity. A newspaper operation captured him leaving his London flat in the early hours of the morning to feed a parking meter. The car at the meter was a Renault Clio; the Foreign Secretary has a ministerial Jaguar. The Foreign Secretary also had a wife of 28 years who was alone in their constituency home in Edinburgh.

The car turned out to belong to Mr Cook's secretary, Gaynor Regan. Sniffing scandal, the newspaper approached Downing Street for comment. Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's spin doctor, called Mr Cook. He was in the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, ready for a three week holiday in America. With Margaret, who had even packed his case.

Mr Campbell said Mr Cook had an hour to choose between the two women. Mr Cook told Margaret that the holiday was off and their marriage was over.

Although he did marry Gaynor, his reputation never really recovered - particularly as the woman spurned, Margaret, had some embarrassing revelations to offer.

However, such was his intellect and such was the respect he had gained from his principled opposition to the Iraq war, it was expected that if - or when - Gordon Brown succeeds Mr Blair as Prime Minister, Mr Cook would have returned to the Cabinet.

Robert Finlayson Cook was born in Lanarkshire, east of Glasgow, an only child whose father was a science teacher. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, the Royal High School in Edinburgh where his father taught, and Edinburgh University where he read English. He planned to go on to study divinity, but doubts about his beliefs set in and he turned his passion and determination into the Labour Party and socialism.

By the time he was a young man, his two great loves, politics and horse-racing, soon became apparent. ''No one knows his horses better than our Robin,'' an acquaintance once said of him, and he had a regular tipster column in the Racing Post.

His first job was as a teacher, but he quickly moved into politics, serving on Edinburgh Corporation and also as secretary of Edinburgh City Labour Party.

He unsuccessfully fought Edinburgh North in 1970, but became MP for Edinburgh Central, later to become Livingston, in 1974.

His political flair and particularly his occasional haughty but effective manner of dealing with his political opponents quickly attracted attention at Westminster.

Cook served in a number of senior posts in opposition, but his cleverness meant that he was well respected rather than well liked. Neil Kinnock didn't take to him, and he was disappointed when Mr Blair preferred to give Mr Brown control of the economy rather than himself. Rather than any involvement in domestic matters, Mr Cook was placed in charge of foreign affairs.

This, though, proved to be the making of the man, because his reputation as one of the great Parliamentarians of his generation was sealed by his devastating assault on John Major's administration over the arms-to-Iraq affair. While Mr Major's ministers had three weeks to prepare their response to the five volume, 2,000-page report, Mr Cook had just two hours. Superb preparation and brilliantly quick thinking enabled him to deliver a coruscating speech in the Commons that caused the Tories to wobble before the electorate's eyes.

A year later in 1997, Labour swept to victory and Mr Blair immediately appointed him Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, where he adopted what he called an ''ethical foreign policy'', a move which led to much derision. It was an expression which was heard less and less as the months rolled by.

During his period at the Foreign Office he provoked anger both in India and Pakistan when he offered to help resolve the crisis in Kashmir.

He was also involved in a peculiar affair in which Sandline International was accused of trying to topple the military dictatorship in Sierra Leone. Mr Cook said at the time he had no knowledge of this, but only a week later Prime Minister Blair said the Government was aware of it and that Sandline was merely trying to restore the legally elected government of the African state.

But his worst moment was when the News of the World rumbled his relationship with his mistress, which led to the extraordinary denouement at Heathrow Airport.

Some time later, when he married Gaynor at a register office in Kent, he discovered that the ceremony had taken place in the absence of the press, and he punched the air with glee.

But there was another rude shock in store for the man who hoped that his next post would be as Chancellor, replacing Gordon Brown. The two men had been at loggerheads over a long-running dispute about devolution.

Not only did that not happen, but Mr Blair coolly demoted him to Leader of the House, a move which Mr Cook plainly resented at the time, but never said so. However, it was a job he gradually grew to like more and more as the months passed by.

However, early in 2003, Mr Cook threatened to resign over the reform of the House of Lords. Mr Blair said he wanted an all-appointed House, which Mr Cook believed was absolutely the wrong thing to do.

But it was the impending war with Iraq which was the issue causing Mr Cook to resign. He summed up his opposition to the war in his much-acclaimed resignation speech in which he said: ''Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?''

But in that selfsame speech, Mr Cook vowed to continue supporting the Prime Minister who was coming under increasing criticism from Labour back-benchers who were also opposed to the war.

When his book came out, shortly after he resigned from the Government, Mr Cook dropped a bombshell by suggesting that Mr Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction available for use. It was a grave accusation which the Opposition appeared to fail to exploit.

He said of Tony Blair: ''The present Prime Minister is the most successful leader of the Labour Party in my lifetime. I hope that he will continue to be the leader of our party, and I hope that he will continue to be successful. I have no sympathy with, and will give no comfort to, those who want to use this crisis to displace him.''

Even so, he continued to attack the ''occupation'' of Iraq by the coalition forces led by the Americans and British contingents. But his principal target appeared to be President Bush and his ''muscular'' foreign policy.

Despite his opposition to Mr Blair's policy on Iraq, Mr Cook played an important role in Labour's 2005 General Election campaign.

He made a major effort to reassure anti-war voters - and particularly Muslims - that they could continue to support the party even if they had serious differences with its leadership over Iraq.

Still, after the election he made several high-profile calls for Mr Blair to step aside and make way for Mr Brown to succeed him.

The tragedy is that a heart attack at the age of 59 has robbed Britain of one of her finer minds at a point in his life when he still had much to give.