Reply #29: Last time I interviewed him and Gaynor for UK TV things were

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far from blissful in the matrimonial department. The public front they showed was as good a spin product as anything Peter Mandelson ever conjured up. The relationship was pretty much over by the time Margater Cook divorced her husband. Gaynor made some pretty crushing statements about the wifely role she was more or less ordered to play when she accompanied her husband on those pathetic PR disasters of QEII's foreign trips to India and elsewhere.

Politically Iraq was the end of the road for Cook and gave him the face saver he desperately needed for UK incompetencce in 9/11. While he may have voiced some genuine convictions re the validity and legality of UK and US action in Iraq, he was totally finished after the 9/11 crisis and his political sidelining originated from there.

As foreign secretary in the run up to 9/11 he had overall responsibility for MI6 - same as the home secretary is responsible for MI5.

He trusted heavily on Thatcher MI6 spook and FO appointee Sherrard Cowper Coles, whom he promoted to be his parliamentary private secretary, before making him UK ambassador to Israel. Cowper Coles then was promoted further and is now sitting pretty as UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Having known Cowper Coles and his wife professionally and personally for over 25 years I would say he is 100% cold war crook whose sole raison d'etre was to gloss over Thatcher and Aitken's criminality in the arms to Iraq debacle which was so conveniently papered over by the Scott Report. Ditto Robert Maxwell's role in selling UK minitary secrets to Israel which Thatcher and later Major were at such pains to whitewash over.

Cowper Coles has also been the one FO spook who ensured that Conrad Black's catalogue of fraud, deception and larceny was excised from UK criminal records and paved the way for Thatcher to be able to insist on him being given a life peerage.

Conrad Black is now the subject of a massive US fraud lawsuit re his Hollinger holdings.

Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary gave Cowper Coles pretty much a free hand in making sure Black was never investigated and prosecuted in the UK because he was beholden first to the Al Maktoums in Dubai and the Al Nahayans in Abu Dhabi during the run up to the BCCI UK class action which eventually began last year.

He also made sure that foreign organised crime related to Saudi dissidents protected by former Saudi spooks' chief Kamel Adham were not investigated and prosecuted in the UK re huge frauds at HSBC - which Mandelson eventually hid in the laughable 'Good Friday Agreement'.

NB Kamel Adham the Saudi top spook was not only a BCCI director/shareholder for many years but during the early years of the Thatcher administration circa 1980-86 was Jonathan Aitken's principal Saudi business partner in financial and arms companies that were eventually linked to the Matrix Churchill fiasco.

A UK investigation into the 2002 early and unexpected death of the Saudi security chief Prince Ahmed bin Faisal overseen by Robin Cook ensured no tricky questions were asked about the Salman brothers' non thoroughbred horeseracing business activities connected to both former US ambassador to the UK William Stamps Farish III, Conrad Black and US organisations which bankrolled George W BUsh into office in 2000.

The only fallout from debacle was when Saudi ambassador to UK Ghazi al Gosaibi was sacked from his job and returned back home to Riyad and the opprobium of his demotion - as Minister for Water and Sewerage. That set the ball rolling for Cook's well orchestrated exit from UK high office.

Keeping that Carlton House terrace grace and favor residence was part of the face saver that Poodle had to agree.