BRITAIN can ill-afford to lose her best minds early, and so Robin Cook's premature death at the age of 59 is a tragedy.

How much of a tragedy can be gauged from snippets of his speech when he resigned from the Government over the war in Iraq. He said: "The longer that I have served in this place (the Commons), the greater the respect I have for the good sense of and collective wisdom of the British people.

"On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain.

"They want (weapons) inspections to be given a chance, and they suspect they are being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US administration."

He also said: "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term."

On practically every count, he was spot on. You don't often get to say that about politicians.

However, Mr Cook was also in favour of "containment" of Saddam and of continued weapons inspections.

But at some point and in some way, containment had to come to an end, just as somewhere a line had to be drawn under the weapons inspections which Saddam was doing his best to thwart.

Indeed, when Mr Cook was Foreign Secretary he led an invasion into Kosovo (an invasion that was probably illegal as it did not have UN backing) to save the Muslims when Slobodan Milosevic could not be contained.

Mr Cook's most celebrated announcement in the Foreign Office was that British policy would have "an ethical dimension". This quickly floundered when arms sales continued to dubious governments and Britain appeared to be just watching murky events in Sierra Leone.

More than anything, Mr Cook's career illustrates that there is often no black and white in politics and that many things are a confusing grey colour.

Of course, Britain should have an ethical foreign policy - but in the real world it is not always as simple as that.

Where Mr Cook will be most missed is in his "piercingly brilliant" presentation of a cause that ensured wherever possible Britain was on the side of the good guy. His dedication to the Commons is also worth reflecting upon as our current administration seems too keen to side-step "the mother of all parliaments".