Robin Cook openly defied his prime minister over the war in Iraq, and resigned from his cabinet post in protest on the eve of the invasion. Now his family has made that defiance his epitaph. It emerged yesterday that Mr Cook's gravestone in a cemetery in Edinburgh has been engraved with a quote from his memoirs, which reads: "I may not have succeeded in halting the war. But I did secure the right of Parliament to decide on war."

Mr Cook died suddenly, aged 59, in August 2005 in the Scottish Highlands on a hill walk with his second wife Gaynor, more than two years after he resigned as leader of the Commons in protest at Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq.