Deadly discretion

THE POINT OF DEPARTURE by Robin Cook (Simon Schuster, 20) THERE is no literary form more enjoyable than a diary. To see another human being's inner life unburdened on to a page - to read of their hopes, fears and frustrations - while at the same time knowing, as the hapless diarist does not, how their life will turn out, is a compelling combination.

Politicians make particularly good diarists. Obliged by their profession to dissemble in public, they mostly seethe with ambition in private, but their careers usually end badly. Which is why, long after their more successful contemporaries are forgotten, we shall still be reading the journals of Chips Channon, Harold Nicholson, Barbara Castle and Alan Clark.

When it became known, therefore, that Robin Cook was planning to publish his own diary of the past two years, there was good reason for excitement. Cook is a shrewd observer, a brilliant debater, a man who made a principled resignation over the Iraq war, a close but never entirely congenial colleague of Tony Blair. It seemed that the ingredients were all in place for another political classic.

Sadly, he has muffed his chance. Either Cook has the dreariest inner life of any man alive - which I doubt, given his obvious devotion to his second wife, Gaynor, and his appreciation of nature and music - or this is not an honest book. Its dullness, or its dissembling, is obvious from the very first entry, which describes how the Prime Minister fired him as Foreign Secretary in June 2001, a mere three days after assuring him he would keep his job.

Yet, on hearing the news, Cook's emotional register barely flickers ("this was a surprising turn"). The entry ends: "In the evening Jack Straw rang me up for a supportive conversation - I am glad it is Jack who is replacing me.

We have been close colleagues for twenty years and I know he will give the Foreign Office his best."

This is Politburo prose: the diary as press release.

Moved from the Foreign Office to his new post as Leader of the Commons, Cook busies himself with parliamentary reform - a subject which, although worthy, tends to have an eyeglazing effect on the reader. This, together with his determination never to say anything unpleasant about his colleagues, his frequent trips to see various socialist mugwumps abroad ("Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, has attracted a high-octane attendance to Copenhagen for his seminar on social democracy and globalisation"), and his longwinded linking passages, make for tedious reading. Curiously, it also lacks an index, destroying its usefulness even to the most dedicated policy wonk.

OF course, the unique selling point of the book - the hint of stocking so shocking it is said to have earned the author a 400,000 advance - is the revelation that Tony Blair realised by March of this year that Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction actually posed no immediate threat to the United Kingdom. But this will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken even a cursory interest in the Hutton Inquiry.

Indeed, the effect of that inquiry has been to take the entire country behind the scenes of 10 Downing Street, and the spectacle that has been revealed - of panic and paranoia, of hyped intelligence and foulmouthed diary entries - is vastly more shocking than anything Robin Cook is able to provide. He has been, in the old-fashioned sense, scooped. To come to this book after reading the Hutton evidence is to be struck, yet again, by how little Cabinet ministers really know about what is going on compared with the tightly knit group of unelected officials around the Prime Minister.

The diary ends, as it begins, in Downing Street, in a meeting with Tony Blair.

This time, instead of being shifted against his will, the diarist is resigning of his own accord, but again he brings to it all the fervour of a note to the milkman: "It was Tony who suggested that I should not attend the special Cabinet meeting. Instead, I walked along to the press wing and called on Alastair for the last time. Together we arranged for one of his assistants to let me out down the back stairs and for my driver to be waiting by the side door."

The contrast between the bathos of this and the forensic brilliance of Cook's resignation statement - delivered later that evening and printed as an appendix - is painful. One can only assume that he hopes one day to return to the Cabinet and consequently is obliged to be discreet about his true feelings. But discretion, the lifeblood of an ambitious politician, is poison in a diarist, for, as Chips Channon once observed: "What is more dull than a discreet diary? One might as well have a discreet soul."

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