Sometimes a political age is best illuminated by those politicians who failed to reach the very top despite their huge gifts. Their lack of complete institutional fit, their slight discomfiture with their times, lends a chiaroscuro effect to our view of political institutions, making us see things in the shadows which the dazzle of the top political stars can paradoxically obscure.
Robin Cook, the former British Foreign Secretary who died aged 59 this weekend, belonged to the same centre-left generation as Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder and was just a few years older than Tony Blair; but while the latter three figures are the apotheosis of governing leaders in our media age, Mr Cook's figure draws our attention to the shadows.
We must not exaggerate his failure. In one sense, it was failure only relative to his great talent. We are discussing the son of a Scottish teacher who became Foreign Secretary, who managed, as Leader of the House of Commons, to modernise the House in some important ways and who was an influential member of the leadership of the Party of European Socialists and who will be remembered as the most brilliant parliamentary speaker of his generation. In another sense, his relative failure to reach the very top can be explained in terms of an insufficient possession of that timeless political skill of political base-building: he was sociable but politically a loner.
So maybe he could have never reached the top, whatever age he lived in. But as the British and international tributes flowed in this week, one could not help noting that even as they detailed the career of a man who had developed his core political convictions to address the times, some of his skills and virtues were becoming less relevant. His adaptability and shortcomings are both related to the leakage of the traditional power of national parliaments towards the media.
His forensic eloquence in parliamentary debate was respected and feared. His 2003 Cabinet resignation speech, over the war in Iraq, is a model of how loyal dissent could be used to expose every contradiction in Mr Blair's case for war:
"...the very intensity of those attempts [to get support for a second resolution within the UN Security Council] underlines how important it was to succeed. Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance... We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat... 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 he had a clear-sighted understanding of the diminishing influence of Parliament. In his diary he wrote of the hapless Conservative leader, William Hague: "Hague's personal tragedy is that his undoubted ability to command the House does not translate itself into an ability to impress the world beyond the political activists". To a lesser extent, this might be the judgment that could be made of Mr Cook. His recognition of this perhaps gave him the necessary detachment to make some acute observations about how politics is affected by the visual media age.
He looked like a garden gnome and his parliamentary eloquence came across as pompous fluency when responding to questions on TV. He did understand the problem: "The most frequent complaint of those who refuse to vote is that there is no point as 'You are all the same'. By this they do not really mean that we have the same views of political priorities. What they are articulating is that we all sound the same, talk in the same secret, coded language and rarely lapse into the colloquial English of our constituents".
It seems he was unable to make the necessary transition in speaking style. But he also crisply underlined the danger at the other end of range, where central party control over the media message becomes excessive. On Mr Blair's New Labour he wrote: "It has replaced old Labour's culture of dissent with New Labour's culture of discipline. The irony is that this central control has solved the old problem of splits and divisions at the expense of contributing to a new problem of trust..."
Mr Cook did not dominate the UK's centre-left politics of his age. But his championing of the European Union and the cause of British entry into the eurozone (after opposing British entry into the Common Market in early career), of an ethical foreign policy, leading to the Foreign Office's annual human rights report and the European code of conduct for arms exports, and of pluralism and cosmopolitanism as values to join democracy and equality, were part of a systemic centre-left vision for the European 21st century that gave values a central place in politics. One of his final warnings in his diary, The Point of Departure, might well come to be the historic epitaph of the Blair era:
"Political movements that leave their mark on history do so because they shape the political culture of society to their values. By that test New Labour is in danger of leaving no mark behind despite a combination of Labour's record length in office with Labour's record majority in office..."