One must be automatically suspicious of those who not only insist that size matters, but who flaunt the size of their IQs in front of the rest of the population as a mark of superiority. At last a female member of the high IQ society has taken them to task and even threatened to start a rival organisation. Julia Baxter has resigned from the governing board of Mensa after claiming its leaders were “sexist, manipulative and bullying”. She has also said ominously that Mensa is tearing itself to pieces. “There are dark forces at work which represent a very unhealthy aspect of high intelligence.”

Quite reasonably, Mrs Baxter believes that intelligence is not simply a matter of performing well in IQ tests, she would also like to promote emotional maturity and personal development.

So that hope has been all but snuffed out.This impressively well researched book paints a picture of a front-rank politician who thought he could rely on the quality of intellectual argument to win through, but who realised, probably too late, that suffering fools was necessary too.. Cook wanted to be Chancellor, but his Keynesianism – rather than his antipathy to Brown – rules that out. It was even speculated by the anonymous Labour MP called “Cassandra” in Tribune that Cook would replace Tony Blair within months of Labour victory. The failure of Cook’s shares to rise partly reflects the fact that the radical left does not have much of a role under Tony Blair.The one issue on which Cook’s democratic radicalism has any hope of influencing the Government is that of electoral reform, but Cook – having launched the dialogue with the Liberal Democrats – is now out of the loop on domestic policy. It was a hostage to fortune, and the ransom was soon demanded.

Kampfner’s sympathy for his subject does not prevent him quoting at length from a 1978 attack on the Labour Government’s sale of arms to the “repressive” Indonesian regime by the New Statesman’s defence correspondent, who would 20 years later be a Labour Foreign Secretary approving the sale of arms to the same country.Kampfner’s original interest in writing the book was “the role of the radical left in the Labour Party under Tony Blair”, but he ended up writing something much more interesting: the story of a very clever man who has never been quite in the right place or the right time. At its launch on 12 May, Cook proclaimed that Britain would “once again be a force for good in the world.. our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension”. The picture is of a collection of fragile egos that occasionally try to be nice to one another, but are usually snubbed and retreat into the nursing of grievances. It may be that one of Cook’s first mistakes as Foreign Secretary was driven by a desire not to be outdone in propaganda terms by the Chancellor, who was branded “Flash” Gordon within five days of the election for his boldness in making the Bank of England independent.