Former foreign secretary Robin Cook

Robin Cook has denied comparing President Bush and Tony Blair to Adolf Hitler.

In a radio interview earlier this week, the former foreign secretary argued that people should not forget that Hitler claimed he was protecting the rights of a German minority by invading Czechoslovakia.

But speaking on Tuesday, he insisted that this was not a reflection on the coalition leaders.

"I am certainly not making any comparison between Tony Blair, George W Bush and Hitler, of course not," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

"They are politically poles apart and they come from very different political systems. The point I was making is that we have got to be very careful that if we claim a right of humanitarian intervention, then it has to be legitimated on a multilateral, international basis.

"What is dangerous is to allow one country, or two countries to decide for themselves which countries should be invaded and have the regime changed on grounds of humanitarian arguments, because those arguments can be used by others in ways that we might not welcome and would not approve."

Cook, who resigned as leader of the Commons in opposition to the war in Iraq, also expressed concern about the general direction of the Labour government.

"What worries me is that I fear that we are losing our electorate in terms of their participation, their enthusiasm for our parliamentary democracy," he said.

"We have become too managerial in our approach to politics. I think we were very successful in our first term of office in carrying through a number of very radical measures which will leave a mark on British society.

"In the second term we have come lost in the thicket of targets, service delivery agreements, and we need to get back to a value-based politics in which we are offering a vision of the kind of society we are needing to create.

"I think we should be quite clear that we are committed to social cohesion, we are committed to social fairness and openness and that, within the public sector, what we want to do is to create a public sector in which we work with the people who provide our public sector and those who depend upon it to revive what is clearly a public realm, run by the public for the public and not over-commercialised."