Campaigner Dame Esther, 83, who was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in January and did not expect to see Christmas, has signed up to Dignitas and says she wants the right to die how she chooses.
Rebecca is hosting her mum and their family for what could be the family’s last Christmas together. (Image: Getty)
It is a final wish from a national treasure preparing for what is likely to be her last Christmas with her family.
In a significant intervention Dame Esther Rantzen has called for MPs to be allowed an urgent debate on assisted dying legislation.
Campaigner Dame Esther, 83, who was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in January and did not expect to see Christmas, has signed up to Dignitas and says she wants the right to die how she chooses.
She is now fighting to give millions with terminal diseases new legal powers in the last and most important campaign in a lifetime of activism.
She has backed the Daily Express campaign Give Us Our Last Rights which calls for a law change on assisted dying and is now calling on MPs to vote on the issue.
She has urged MPs to think of their own loved ones and the peaceful end they would wish for them as she accused politicians of avoiding a debate on assisted dying because it will not get them votes.
In an impassioned plea to MPs she said: “I would say to parliamentarians: ‘think of the people you love in your own life, maybe who are older, maybe who are unwell, and think how you would wish them to spend their last days and weeks’.
Dame Esther added: “It is agonising to watch someone you love suffer. Nobody wants that for their family. And we live in a day and age when it’s perfectly possible to offer people a gentle, peaceful death. Make this personal, think this through and then put it on the national agenda. Debate it carefully. And come, we hope, to a humane decision.”
Dame Esther and her daughter Rebecca, 43, are also prepared to take their local MP Michael Gove to task over the issue during the festive period.
It comes after Mr Gove echoed Esther’s calls for a free vote on the issue, after she revealed she has signed up to go to Dignitas in Switzerland to end her life if a “magic drug” she is taking to assist her is not working.
Rebecca is hosting her mum and their family for what could be the family’s last Christmas together.
Rebecca lives in the politician’s constituency of Surrey Heath, and has suggested paying him a visit to encourage him to fully support their campaign.
“She’s coming to me at some point over Christmas and he is my local MP,” said Rebecca. “We could go and knock on his door – I will film it.
“If we need to doorstep Michael Gove, it’s only local.”
Mr Gove has already backed Dame Esther’s calls for a vote, but says he requires further convincing that UK laws should be changed.
He said: “I am not yet persuaded of the case for assisted dying but I do think it’s appropriate for the Commons to revisit this.”
In 2015, MPs voted to keep assisted dying illegal in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, where it carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
However, over the past year, the Health and Social Care Committee have been examining cases for and against changing the law in an inquiry and is due to publish its report.
It comes after Rebecca said she not want her mother to die alone, saying: “She would want to be surrounded by her family. We wouldn’t be able to go because we’d be arrested on landing.”
Rebecca believes the UK would easily be able to adapt the US state of Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act for its own purpose.
Since 1997, it has been legal in Oregon for terminally ill, mentally competent patients to choose to end their lives.
“We wouldn’t have to remake the wheel,” she said. “We could stand on other people’s shoulders and make this work for our country so that it protects people that are vulnerable, which is what everybody is worried about, quite rightly. The few baddies out there, evil people that would take advantage of them, we can protect and make the law protect that those people shouldn’t have access.
“That’s why I think we need midwives to carry people through death.”
Dame Esther is awaiting a scan after Christmas which will determine how well her “miracle drug” is working, and then she has suggested she may “buzz off to Zurich” if the outcome is not good.
Her family are devastated that this would mean they have to say goodbye to her at the airport, and let her die alone.
Rebecca said that if the family had their way they would all be with Esther as she passed.
“My brother, sister and I would be next to her, telling jokes, sharing our final Wordle score, she would beat us at Scrabble, she would close her eyes, and have a rest, and possibly not wake up,” she said.
“That’s the way she would like to go, I think, but maybe I’m putting words into her mouth, and she’d rather Nigel Havers was gently stroking her forehead. He’s always been a favourite of hers.
“Who wouldn’t want to die surrounded by their family, as long as they loved them?
“I don’t want her to go. I don’t want her to die. I certainly don’t want her to go alone. It’s an unknowable, unfathomable situation that I never thought we’d be in.”
That’s Life and Hearts of Gold host, Dame Esther founded ChildLine for young people in 1986 and The Silver Line to combat loneliness for the older generation in 2013.
Dame Esther and her late husband Desmond Wilcox, who she still lovingly refers to as “my Desi”, had three children Rebecca, 43, Miriam, 45, and Joshua, 42, who will spend Christmas with their mum along with her grandchildren, Benji, 11, Alexander, eight, Teddy, eight, and twins Florence and Romilly, five.
Dame Esther is insistent that she and she alone should be able to choose how to die.
She said: “My family say it’s my decision and my choice. I explained to them that actually I don’t want their last memories of me to be painful because if you watch someone you love having a bad death, that memory obliterates all the happy times and I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want to be that sort of victim in their lives.”
She added: “I know the memory of a bad death obliterates the happy memories that you would want to hang on to, but the memory of a good death is comforting for all those involved.
“So I would say to parliamentarians make this personal because there is no more personal decision than your own life or your own death.”
Unlike other countries euthanasia is illegal in Britain and can be prosecuted as murder or manslaughter. Since 2009, there have been 167 cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service, three of which have been successfully prosecuted.
In 2021 former social worker Baroness Meacher, a crossbench peer and the Chair of Dignity in Dying, introduced a private members bill on assisted dying. It is still making its way through Parliament.
It seeks to “enable adults who are terminally ill to be provided at their request with specified assistance to end their own life”. It applies only to people who are over 18, have a terminal illness, have the mental capacity to make the decision, and have made a voluntary request to end their own lives.
Terminally ill is defined as having an inevitably progressive condition, diagnosed by a doctor, which cannot be reversed (as opposed to alleviated) by treatment and where, as a result of which, death is reasonably expected within six months.
An application to the High Court would have to be made by an individual who wants assisted dying declaring their “voluntary, settled, informed wish to end their own life”.
But a refusal to fully and openly debate law changes mean families have been denied dignity in death.
The blueprint we support would give terminally ill people who are of sound mind with less than six months to live the option of requesting medical assistance to end their lives.
We will be launching a petition calling for a law change.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman added: “The position of the Government has not changed. It is a matter for Parliament to decide. It’s an issue of conscience for individual parliamentarians.”