Esther Rantzen is wrong about assisted suicide

It can’t be any fun to have lung cancer as Dame Esther Rantzen does; I watched my father die from mesothelioma over the best part of a decade, and in the last couple of years this once tall, handsome, athletic man was more or less a tumour on legs. But I recall the zest with which he greeted each day, and the pleasure he took in seeing the seasons change. Once I said to him, in a fit of drunken sentiment, ‘Dad, if it ever gets too much… you do have a lot of pills, don’t you?’ He looked at me, shocked, then called to my mum while winking at me, ‘Get in ‘ere quick, Bette – our daughter wants to kill me!’ 

With such a stoic example, I can’t help but disapprove of the dame putting the damper on the festive season by announcing that she has joined Dignitas and might ‘buzz off to Zurich’ if the new drugs don’t work: ‘If you watch someone you love having a bad death, that memory obliterates all the happy times… I’ve got to drop off my perch for some reason, and I’m 83 so I should be jolly grateful and indeed am.’  

Rantzen has lived a life that’s full, to put it mildly, and she’s lived a useful one – even if she did occasionally help herself to other people’s husbands with the zest of a recently released convict regarding the breakfast buffet at a five-star hotel. Her popular television programme That’s Life served as a formative, if thoroughly negative, experience in my youth – my innate antipathy to talking dogs and the ‘Order of the Week’ helping me decide very early on that the normal life was not for me – though her list of achievements is considerable. She founded the excellent charity Childline in 1986 and in 2012 The Silver Line, which seeks to alleviate loneliness among old people. She is the recipient of many awards, for everything from journalism to charity. She’s an OBE and a CBE – but whenever I see her name now, I do wish she’d be QT, ASAP. 

Privileged, high-profile types should think seriously about advocating ‘assisted dying’. No one’s ever going to bump off Esther Rantzen against her will – she’d get up from her deathbed and frog march them down to the cop shop. My sister-in-law Charlotte Raven acknowledged in her Guardian piece this year that:

I understand those arguing against assisted dying worry that vulnerable people might be coerced into suicide, especially the elderly. But I find it baffling that this is seen as valid opposition. Of course terrible things happen to innocent people, but when opinion polls show support for assisted dying, why would a hypothetical outcome take precedent over the reality of death?

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Opinion polls show support for stopping mass immigration and bringing back the death penalty too, but I’ve never heard Charlotte or her Guardian colleagues espouse these opinions simply because they’re popular. The point is that terrible things tend not to happen to people with media platforms – they happen instead to quiet, accommodating people who are easily bullied, so it’s them we should be thinking about when we consider removing legal obstacles to people ‘assisting’ other people to their deaths. The Spectator has published several excellent essays on this subject – the most read piece of 2022 being one (and others here, here and here). 

Euthanasia, to give killing done in the name of ‘caring’ its correct name, will start with the old who are in the pain, but it won’t end there. If legalised, it will be applied to depressed people and poor people – as it already has in Canada – and, eventually, anyone whose ‘quality of life’ isn’t what it was when they were 22 and who feels a bit blue. People suffering the loss of someone they love – whether through death or desertion – will be particularly vulnerable. A change in the law would be a bully’s charter – and let’s not kid ourselves that doctors are saints who would invariably stand between the murderee and a grasping relative. Of course most doctors go into the racket because they want to help people – but some do it because they like to have power over people. After all, this was the year when nearly two-thirds of female surgeons said they had been sexually harassed by male doctors and a third said they had been actually sexually assaulted by their male colleagues.  

In my opinion, the unwillingness of a society to consider bumping off its elderly en masse is the measure of a civilised one. How dare we presume that they’re less happy because they’re not as physically fit as youngsters? Old people are (along with the Jews, as it shamefully transpired this year) one of the few minority groups who it’s fine to disparage – often for not being as much of a minority as we believe they should be. A Times feature this week trumpeted that ‘Children in Italy are outnumbered more than five to one by people aged 65 and over,’ as if these legions of doting nonnas were an invading army actively seeking to oppress their innocent grandchildren. I doubt that you could use this term about any other group of people without being called a bigot. 

There is something else assisted dying would deny us; it’s by witnessing the slow, natural deaths of those we love that we learn the hardest truth about life – that it will end – and ready ourselves for our own departure; I’m sure that seeing my parents die has had increased my stoicism on this issue. Every day we draw closer to joining the vast fellowship of souls – that’s why death is sometimes known as ‘joining the majority’ – and whisking away the sick, the old and the sad to a hygienic end in a death factory strikes me as not being the most benign reaction. So – even though she’s not to my taste – I do hope Dame Esther sticks around.