He has had his successes in this position, and he genuinely believes in Parliament’s role as a body that can scrutinise the executive He rightly wants to make Parliament topical. But he was, however, embarrassingly defeated on a proposal to take the select committees out of the control of the whips, a move that was supposed to be a free vote but that the Labour and Tory whips extraordinarily conspired to defeat. It cannot have encouraged Cook and it is hard to believe that the day-to-day business of the Government’s legislative programme and a protracted and debilitating battle with Lord Irvine about reform of the Lords will keep this powerful and ambitious intellect satisfied for the next three or four years.Cook, 56 this year with a wife 11 years his junior, in the Commons since February 1974 and on the front bench more or less continuously since 1984, may not want to go on and on at Westminster, rebel leader or not. It seems unlikely that he would move north to take over as First Minister of Scotland, even if such a piece of overt reverse carpet-bagging were a practical proposition. In such a role he would be, in effect a supplicant to Brown as Chancellor, and that is not a role that Cook would fall into naturally.

He could turn to a larger role abroad, possibly in the European Commission, possibly elsewhere. He could point to the example of many predecessors – David Owen’s work in the Balkans, or Lord Carrington’s and former defence secretary George Robertson’s appointment as Nato Secretary General. That sort of role would not be beyond his talents; but he would not be nominated for it if he walked out of the Government.But the really intriguing question is not what Robin might do next but what Robin might have been. It seems odd to think of him as Labour’s lost leader, but it is worth contemplating.

What if he had been better looking? What if his ex- wife had not made him a laughing stock by describing how she once found him “flat out on the dining room floor with a brandy bottle”? What if he had found it easier to make friends? What if he had just shaved the beard off, something he grew, according to Margaret Cook, as a student because he was secretly modelling himself on George Bernard Shaw?Cook himself sometimes recognises his flaws He says of his new wife, Gaynor. “I think that I owe her a lot in that she has an emotional intelligence to her. I think she has also taught me that one needs to understand and respond to other people’s feelings, which possibly I was not good at before.” Things might have been different if this clever school swot had discovered his emotional intelligence a little earlier. Life Story Born Robert Finlayson Cook, 28 February 1946 Bellshill, Lanarkshire.

Some scientists thought Jan Hendrik Sch?as headed for the Nobel physics prize. Among the scores of papers he published in just three years, in a field where only a handful annually count as productive, was one saying that he had created a single-molecule transistor. It would allow computers to shrink by factors of many thousands, and revolutionise our world. He was accused of the highest crime in the scientific world: of faking and manipulating his data. Unable to mount a credible defence, Dr Sch?as fired for scientific misconduct on Thursday by the telecoms company Lucent, owner of Bell Labs, after a four-month investigation. It was the first such firing in Bell’s 77 years.The clue that first gave him away: Two different papers, Nature and Science, had an identical graph, but were meant to be “about different materials under different conditions”, said Carl Ziemelis, physical sciences editor at Nature in London. “And it wasn’t a re-statement of data from the other paper.” The graphs were identical, down to the tiniest data point.