Robin Cook was born in the County Hospital, Bellshill, Scotland, the only son of Peter and Christina Cook (nee Lynch). His father was a Chemistry teacher who grew up in Fraserburgh, and his grandfather was a miner before being blacklisted for being involved in a strike. Cook was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and, from 1960, the Royal High School in Edinburgh. At first, Cook intended to become a Church of Scotland minister, but lost his faith as he discovered politics.

Cook became known as a brilliant parliamentary debater, and rose through the party ranks, becoming a frontbench spokesman in 1980, and reaching the Shadow Cabinet in June 1983, as spokesperson on European affairs. He was campaign manager for Neil Kinnock's successful 1983 bid to become leader of the Labour Party. A year later he was made party campaign co-ordinator but in October 1986 Cook was surprisingly voted out of the shadow cabinet. He was re-elected in July 1987 and in October 1988 elected to Labour's National Executive Committee. He was one of the key figures in the modernisation of the Labour Party under Kinnock. He was Shadow Health Secretary (1987-92) and Shadow Trade Secretary (1992-94), before taking on foreign affairs in 1994, the post he would become most identified with (Shadow Foreign Secretary 1994-97, Foreign Secretary 1997-2001). In 1994, following the death of John Smith, he ruled himself out of contention for the Labour leadership, apparently on the grounds that he was "insufficiently attractive" to be an election winner, although two close family bereavements in the week in which the decision had to be made may have contributed. On 26 February 1996, following the publication of the Scott Report into the 'Arms-to-Iraq' affair, he made a speech in response to the then President of the Board of Trade Ian Lang in which he said "this is not just a Government which does not know how to accept blame; it is a Government which knows no shame". His parliamentary performance on the occasion of the publication of the five-volume, 2,000-page Scott Report--which he claimed he was given just two hours to read before the relevant debate, thus giving him three seconds to read every page--was widely praised on both sides of the House as one of the best performances the Commons had seen in years, and one of Cook's finest hours. The government won the vote by a majority of one. As Joint Chairman (alongside Liberal Democrat MP Robert Maclennan) of the Labour-Liberal Democrat Joint Consultative Committee on Constitutional Reform, Cook brokered the 'Cook-Maclennan Agreement' that laid the basis for the fundamental reshaping of the British constitution outlined in Labour's 1997 General Election manifesto. This led to legislation for major reforms including Scottish and Welsh devolution, the Human Rights Act and removing the majority of hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Other measures have not been enacted so far, such as further House of Lords reform. On 5 May 2011 the United Kingdom held a referendum on replacing the first-past-the-post voting system with the Alternative Vote method. On 6 May it was announced that the proposed move to the AV voting system had been rejected by a margin of 67.9% to 32.1%. CANNOTANSWER

When did the opposition end?

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