ROBIN COOK: DEAD MAN, SEALED FILE Robin Cook quit the government over a war he said was built on a lie. 2 years later he was dead on a Scottish hillside, and the case was shut before anyone finished their tea. In March 2003 Robin Cook stood up in the House of Commons @HouseofCommons and resigned as Leader of the House rather than back the Iraq War. MPs from every party gave him a standing ovation. That had never happened in that chamber before, and it has not happened since. For the next two years Robin Cook told anyone who would listen that Tony Blair had walked Britain into a war built on nothing. History eventually agreed with him. It did not save him. On 6 August 2005 Robin Cook was hillwalking with his wife Gaynor Cook on Ben Stack, a mountain in Sutherland. He collapsed with a heart attack, fell around 8 feet down a ridge, and was airlifted to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. He was pronounced dead minutes after arriving. Days later a post mortem gave the cause as hypertensive heart disease. The Northern Constabulary treated it as a routine medical death and left it there. No inquest reopening. No criminal inquiry. A former Foreign Secretary who had spent two years humiliating the government over an illegal war dropped dead on one of the most remote hillsides in the country, and the file closed almost as fast as it opened. Here is the detail that rarely makes the story. Ben Stack sits inside the Reay Forest Estate, owned by the Grosvenor family. At the time Robin Cook died on that hill, Gerald Grosvenor, the 6th Duke of Westminster, was serving as assistant chief of the defence staff at the Ministry of Defence. Robin Cook died on land connected to a senior Ministry of Defence figure, two years after resigning over that same ministry's war. Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP who later became a Home Office minister and spent years investigating the death of weapons inspector David Kelly, said in 2007 that Robin Cook had been on Ministry of Defence linked land when he died and that he had real doubts about the official account. Columnist David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) called him a conspiracy theorist for saying it. That label has a habit of landing on the people asking questions, never on the people refusing to answer them. Then there is the part almost nobody covers. From 2020 onward, requests were filed with Police Scotland (@PoliceScotland) under Freedom of Information law for the basic facts of that day. What time officers were alerted. Whether witnesses were interviewed. Whether the hillwalker who helped Gaynor Cook down the mountain was ever identified. Police Scotland refused, arguing the requests repeated an earlier one. The Scottish Information Commissioner (@FOIScotland) told them that reasoning did not hold up. So Police Scotland switched tactics and refused the actual content instead, citing legal exemptions. The Commissioner upheld that refusal in Decision 074/2021 and again in Decision 011/2022. 20 years on, the basic facts of how a former Foreign Secretary died on a Scottish hillside remain sealed. Nobody had to cover anything up. They just had to outlast the people asking. SOURCES @HeraldScotland @thetimes @FOIScotland @PoliceScotland @BBC