They're hardly foreign to sleaze

If Robin Cook and others manage to extricate themselves from the first bit of real spider's-web trouble to hit the FO since Cook took over - and it looks as if they will - they will be adding to a long line of Ministers and officials who have survived ''scandals'' which promised more than they delivered.

What usually happens with such matters is that someone - back bencher/journalist/civil servant with an axe to grind - picks up that all is not well with some deal or other with which a government department has been involved.

Initially, all hell breaks loose, with screaming headlines and demands for emergency statements and immediate resignations, but for all sorts of reasons the Whitehall machine takes over, and the matter is kicked into touch. Apart from anything else, the issue almost always becomes so complicated that the public loses all interest, and the ultimate kiss of death is the announcement in the House of a ''full and independent inquiry'' followed by an assurance that the outcome will be made public and fully debated.

Getting bodies in these situations is virtually impossible, as Mr Cook has just proved, and there are two glaring recent examples of much the same thing involving, of course, the sleaze-hit Tories.

Does anyone remember the Pergau Dam project? This, which led to all sorts of uproar, including calls for the resignation of the then Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, dated back to 1989, but the row dragged on into 1994.

In a nutshell, aid for the Malaysian Pergau Dam was promised by Mrs Thatcher when she was Prime Minister at the same time that Britain was negotiating a #1300m arms deal with the Malaysian government.

By the time someone smelled a rat - alleged linkage of foreign aid with an arms deal - Mr Hurd had inherited the problem and authorised the payment, #234m from the overseas aid budget.

The courts took a dim view, and said that Hurd had acted unlawfully - a fairly serious conclusion to reach about a Minister - but the old Etonian told a packed Commons on December 13, 1994, that the project had been approved before he became Foreign Secretary and that he had ''authorised continued payments, against the advice of the Overseas Development Permanent Secretary, to fulfil the promise made to the Malaysian Government in 1991 by the then Prime Minister

Margaret Thatcher''.

Despite a bravura Commons performance by one Robin Cook - ''There is a disturbing pattern in a number of countries of big rises in our aid to them following big arms orders by them'' - Hurd made clear there was no question of him resigning, and the murky waters were further muddied by all sorts of confusing references to ''a #22m sub-contract for the Ankara Metro; a #23m project to build a television station in Indonesia; and provision of a flight information system worth #2.9m

in Botswana''. All more than enough to keep the chattering classes occupied but hardly the stuff of ministerial scalping. The Scott Inquiry into arms for Iraq was, of course, a much bigger fish, and here the Tory Government, already in its death throes and tarnished by sleaze, found it harder to call off the Opposition hounds, who had the press pack following closely behind.

Clearly all was not well, with Ministers being accused of deliberately failing to inform parliament of a change to guidelines which allowed the sale of arms to Iraq right up until the moment Kuwait was invaded, and all sorts of complicated trouble over the signing of so-called Public Interest Immunity certificates.

In addition, three directors of a company called Matrix Churchill found themselves on trial accused of illegally exporting arms to Iraq, only to find that their trial collapsed when Mr Alan Clark, a former Defence Minister, gave evidence that the Government had known all along what was happening.

It even emerged that a Mr Paul Henderson, the main accused in the trial, had been an agent for MI5 and MI6, supplying them with details of his company's activities.

Even this, despite the Opposition's best endeavours and yet another rapier-like performance in the Commons from Mr Cook, was not enough to bring about any ministerial resignations. The then Trade President Ian Lang put a gloss on the whole thing, telling the House that while mistakes had been made, Ministers and officials had acted in good faith.

Mr Cook, who had three hours to digest the Scott report against Mr Lang's eight days, objected that the Government was laying the blame on the Opposition and on civil servants, but would accept no blame on the part of Ministers, and the Opposition tried for weeks to force the resignations of William Waldegrave, then Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and Sir Nicholas Lyell, then Attorney General, to absolutely no avail.

Issues like Pergau Dam and arms to Iraq clearly do not do governments any good, but nor do they prove in the end to be fatal. Civil servants and political advisers are far too streetwise to let

that happen. Mr Cook has had his first, uncomfortable dip in the murky waters, but very little of the mud ever sticks.