Comment

ROBIN Cook must rue the day he agreed to let the cameras record his first days as Foreign Secretary. Never famous for taking advice, he felt confident enough to reveal his recipe for success in the international hot-seat: ''I have recognised you can be good if you focus on the big picture and not necessarily finish the paperwork.''

How the goddess nemesis must have laughed at this display of unashamed hubris, before coming down and thwacking Mr Cook over the head with that nasty letter from Sandline International about arms shipments to Sierra Leone. The Tories will not let him forget his cockiness. The Foreign Secretary now faces two inquiries, each of which will revolve in large part around the management of paperwork.

On Tuesday Mr Cook went before MPs and slapped away suggestions that he is lazy and does not complete his paperwork. But the impression has lodged in the mind of those who watch the Foreign Secretary that he does not possess the barrister's fondness for reams of detail. His enemies like to describe him as A4 Cook, because of his (apocryphal) preference for one page summaries.

New Ministers need all the help they can get. Gerald Kaufman, that delightfully acid-tongued Labour veteran, republished his guidebook on how to be a Minister before the election. It includes a helpful section on managing the paperwork generated by private office. But who these days has time to read, what with those bulging red boxes sitting alongside you on the back seat of your chauffeur driven car?

The best sort of advice is delivered in person and in the simplest of terms. In this week's House magazine here at Westminster, Mr Cook and his hapless Junior Minister Tony Lloyd will find the kind of handy hint which could have saved them a lot of trouble.

Ted Rowlands, the Welsh Labour MP, recalls his first day as James Callaghan's junior in the Foreign Office way back in 1975. Sensing a novice at the diplomacy game, he recalls how ''Jim pointed at lots of little dots on the map and told me that some countries seem small and of little impact but that they can have a habit of embarrassing and humiliating governments.

''I was entrusted with making sure that that didn't happen or else I would get sacked.''

There, in a nutshell, is a rule for Foreign Office Ministers to live by. Straightforward, to the point, and absolutely clear. Do not let the far away countries of which we know little sneak up on a government focused on the domestic agenda and precipitate a crisis. Mr Lloyd did, and the odds of his survival beyond the next reshuffle must now be slim.

After a year in office, an emerging theme of this government is exhaustion. Physically and mentally Ministers in all departments show every sign of being worn down by the merciless pressure of business. In Mr Cook's case the pressure is intensified by the demands of constant foreign travel. The victims of the next reshuffle will include those, like Mr Lloyd, who have shown themselves unable to keep up with the pace.

The most surprising thing about the arms-to-Africa row, as it has inevitably been dubbed by a media always searching for a convenient shorthand, is how much it has infuriated the Prime Minister and his advisers.

They are scathing about what Tony Blair has dubbed the ''hoo-hah'' over the allegations which centre on the Government's involvement in an apparent breach of the United Nations arms embargo slapped on Sierra Leone last year.

By last night the story had begun to fade into the background. India's nuclear tests, and the prospects of a fundamentalist Hindu government precipitating a showdown with Pakistan, looms large on the radar. Elsewhere Kosovo is rapidly turning into another Balkans disaster. Oh, and there's riots in Indonesia. Several dead. More small dangerous dots on the map.

Downing Street's basic point is that despite the fuss, not a shred of evidence has been provided to back the sensational suggestion that British officials plotted with a bunch of London-based mercenaries to smuggle weapons into Sierra Leone as part of a military campaign to throw out a band of murderous thugs.

To that extent, they are right. But the legalities of it are no longer the issue. Arms-to-Africa is about Robin Cook's performance, about his approach to a job where brains matter less than nous. Tony Blair's frustration, evident yesterday in the Commons and in his ''hoo-hah'' intervention on Monday, is the frustration of a man forced to clean up the mess left by an incompetent office junior.

The inquiries are unlikely to find any wrong-doing on the part of officials or Ministers. But they will show incompetence. And then Mr Cook will have to decide if incompetence, be it his or that of his officials (''not every one here is an Einstein'', one FO man told me), is a resigning offence. His job was to protect Mr Blair from embarrassment at the hands of small dots on the map. And in that he's failed.