Prue Leith has opened up about the personal reason why she is campaigning to make assisted dying legal in the UK.
The Great British Bake Off star has been supportive of the legalisation of assisted dying since 2012, when her brother, David, died from bone cancer.
She said that watching David suffer in pain made her question why those who are dying are not able to die on their own terms.
Speaking to The Times ahead of her new Channel 4 documentary, Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip, Leith recalled how her brother was given morphine every four hours, but the pain relief only lasted for three hours.
As a result, he was “crying out, screaming, in absolute agony” for six hours each day.
The Bake Off judge said that when David “was full of morphine, he was delightful”.
“He would be chatting to his family and telling them he loved them, and he was quite happy to die because he had a great life,” she said of her brother, who was 74 when he passed. “They are the sort of memories they should have been left with.”
Leith said that the request to increase his morphine doses was declined because “morphine is addictive”. She argued that it “doesn’t matter if he gets addicted” as he was reaching the end of his life.
“Why, if you can prevent it, would you allow somebody to insist on somebody having six weeks of pain and misery? They’re going to die anyway,” she said. “They want out now, and when the family’s memories are good ones.”
Leith also revealed that if she were to be diagnosed with a terminal illness and given just a few months to live, she would “get my things in order and top myself”.
She added: “I’ve had a wonderful life. A really happy, successful, pleasurable life. I don’t want the last six weeks, or whatever, to be horrible. Not just for me, but for everybody around me.”
Assisted dying and euthanasia are illegal under English law. The NHS says that a person approaching the last stage of their life has a “right to high quality, personalised end-of-life care that helps you live as well as possible until you die”.
Campaigners from Dignity in Dying, which wants to change the law, argue that the UK should give people the “option to control their death” and they are “not suicidal – they don’t want to die but they do not have the choice to live”.
In her new Channel 4 documentary, Leith and her son Danny Kruger, the Conservative MP for Devizes in Wiltshire, discuss their opposing views on the topic. Kruger is against legalising assisted dying and wants to improve palliative care.
He told the newspaper: “My uncle had very bad quality care, I’m afraid to say. The issue was the protocols about the administration of morphine, and he was in and out of hospital.
“Too many people die like that, and they shouldn’t. They should be dying with proper care.”
