Delivering the Robin Cook dinner memorial lecture was one of many best privileges of my time in Parliament. But it surely wasn’t only a privilege – it was a burden too. The identify Robin Cook dinner nonetheless carries a weight that few in politics at the moment can match. To honour it correctly meant going past platitudes, to wrestle with the substance of his life and what it calls for of us now.
And one thing occurred alongside the best way. By the tip of writing the lecture, I admired him greater than after I started. Not as a result of he was flawless – he wasn’t – however as a result of his flaws by no means stopped him from exhibiting braveness when it mattered most. Cook dinner’s instance proves that greatness and fallibility can coexist, and that integrity in politics is at all times a selection. In an age when politics is just too usually lowered to managerial calculation or performative outrage, that could be a lesson we desperately have to relearn.
Cook dinner’s profession was a lesson in steadiness. He existed on the fulcrum of politics: that precarious level between pragmatism and precept the place the one critical politics is completed.
It’s the level Labour has hardly ever managed to carry. Too usually the celebration has lurched between purity politics, too inflexible to manipulate, and managerial politics, too hole to encourage. Cook dinner refused each useless ends. He tailored when actuality demanded it, however he refused to give up the values that anchored him.
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That steadiness gave that means to his eventual resignation over Iraq. It wasn’t a rash act of conscience from somebody unused to energy. It was the fruits of a profession spent holding the road between pragmatism and precept – and recognising when the road had been crossed.
Cook dinner additionally understood that politics was not a factional recreation of winners and losers. He was trusted throughout the Labour spectrum as a result of he didn’t deal with disagreement as betrayal. He brokered alliances between Tribune and the Marketing campaign Group not as a result of he agreed with every part both mentioned, however as a result of he believed each a part of Labour had one thing important to contribute.
That tolerance looks like one other period. Right this moment dissent is pathologised, alternatives are stitched up, members handled as irritants. Labour’s pluralism, as soon as its superpower, has been changed by a tradition of management.
Cook dinner as soon as in contrast celebration administration to the reins of a horse. The reins, he mentioned, are there to steadiness the animal earlier than the bounce, to channel its power and ensure it clears the impediment. They don’t seem to be there to yank the horse’s head down, stifle its motion, or cease it operating in any respect. Cook dinner’s metaphor captured one thing important: that management is about harnessing enthusiasm, not strangling it. Right this moment, the reins are pulled so tight the horse can barely transfer.
However metaphor’s apart, Cook dinner’s politics had been rooted not in abstraction however in a fierce sense of who was being left behind. In personal he frightened Labour’s modernisation programme alienated the underside 20%. This meant they had been vulnerable to being deserted by the mainstream and absorbed into the ranks of fascism. He noticed what occurs when markets tear freed from social bonds, when individuals are handled as disposable. Lengthy earlier than at the moment’s populist surges, Cook dinner feared that if Labour failed the poorest, others would declare them with a politics of resentment and exclusion.
Go searching now and his fears really feel prophetic. As disinformation swirls, as alienation hardens into rage, the far proper provides belonging to these left adrift. Cook dinner’s warning wasn’t simply evaluation. It was a glimpse of our current.
Cook dinner additionally knew that Labour’s job was not simply to manipulate however to reform the system itself. Watching Margaret Thatcher declare that proportional illustration would imply “no extra Conservative governments ever” was, for him, an epiphany. He embraced PR not as a tactical gimmick however as an ethical necessity.
Cook dinner noticed {that a} political tradition open to illustration and debate can be stronger, not weaker. That dialogue and disagreement make politics more healthy. And he warned that until Labour modified the voting system, it might sooner or later discover itself again in opposition on a minority vote. He was proper.
Above all, Cook dinner understood integrity because the lifeblood of democracy. His resignation in 2003 uncovered what I name the “integrity hole”: the gulf between what governments say and what the general public imagine. That hole was not born with Blair, but it surely widened dramatically underneath him.
The lure had been set by Thatcher and Main, as public service was hollowed out and politics turned more and more managerial. But it surely was Blair’s false prospectus for conflict that blew it open. Belief in politics by no means recovered.
And what stuffed the void? A political tradition the place proximity to wealth turned the measure of success. The place public service was not an finish in itself, however a stepping stone to company consultancy or a boardroom seat. Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador was not an aberration; it was the logical consequence of this political tradition.
Joseph Conrad’s Coronary heart of Darkness is one other helpful metaphor right here. Some shed their early idealism and, like Conrad’s Kurtz, couldn’t return. As a replacement grew one thing colder: a political class comfy with company seize, for whom public service was not its personal reward.
And right here is the hazard. The Labour management is now confronted by a world of disinformation, by an authoritarian proper nicely versed in wielding it. But the political tradition Labour has embraced – illiberal of dissent, dismissive of members and the general public, cosy with company energy – leaves it unable to reply with authenticity.
Integrity is the premise of authenticity. And authenticity is the precondition of belief. With out belief, no attraction to withstand authoritarianism will land. That’s the reason, when the prime minister warns of the hazards of the far proper, many will merely hear hole phrases. How can he convincingly name out authoritarianism overseas whereas presiding over its habits at house? How can he rally folks towards billionaire-backed demagogues whereas inviting Oracle, BlackRock and company lobbyists into the center of presidency?
That is the actual hazard of the integrity hole. On the very second we most want politics able to calling out the authoritarian proper, our political class shares too lots of its instincts: disdain for pluralism, impatience with democracy, consolation with company energy. In attempting to withstand authoritarianism, it dangers echoing it.
However Cook dinner’s life exhibits us one other means. He confirmed that politics may nonetheless imply one thing. That integrity was not decorative however important. That pluralism was not weak point however energy. That public service, finished for its personal sake, was the best calling.
If Labour is to fulfill this second, it should rediscover the fulcrum the place Cook dinner lived: the steadiness between pragmatism and precept, energy and integrity, pluralism and objective. As a result of until we shut the integrity hole, until we rebuild a political tradition that’s open, tolerant and trustworthy, we’ll stay incapable of confronting the forces now rising towards democracy.
Cook dinner as soon as confirmed that braveness is contagious. The query is whether or not we’ve got the braveness to comply with him.
This text primarily based on a speech given by Clive Lewis MP on the Robin Cook dinner Memorial Lecture, Sept 2025
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