Assisted dying

‘Grab that crab, Clarissa!/ Eat that meat, Jennifer!’ It was with these words – the start of their self-sung theme tune – that Two Fat Ladies first burst on to our screens 30 years ago. Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright were exceptionally unlikely stars. Both heavy drinkers and smokers, they had slightly fallen into cooking careers on the edge of the British Establishment. Jennifer used to be the cook at The Spectator, creating cream-laden dishes for staff while necking wine. Clarissa developed quinine poisoning from consuming around six pints of gin and tonic a day. Jennifer died in 1999; Clarissa in 2014. Clarissa was sober by the time Two Fat Ladies was filmed, but she had been seriously affected by her love of booze.

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, spoke to President Donald Trump of America about the importance of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, but resisted his call for Britain’s ships to be sent there. The government considered sending British-made Octopus drone-interceptors to the Middle East. Sir Keir said £53 million would help a million households reliant on heating oil – £53 a household; ‘It’s moments like this that tell you what a government is about,’ he said. The economy showed zero growth in January, according to the Office for National Statistics. The ONS added alcohol-free beer to the basket of goods used to calculate inflation. John Lewis awarded staff a bonus for the first time in four years.

Brute force Sir: General Sir Nick Carter is correct to point out the fragility of the UK’s armed forces today (‘Empty shell’, 7 February). He is also right to highlight the level of expenditure which will be necessary to overcome 25 years of structural under-investment in defence if the UK and its allies are to deter or win any future war. However, the suggestion that the British armed forces might be saved – relatively cheaply – by the institution of AI-automated kill chains alone is questionable. Indeed, it may be just another mirage of the type which has contributed to the current predicament. Autonomous weapons systems have existed for many years. With AI, they will proliferate and may become more important.

The Catholic Church has always been remarkably relaxed about sin. It becomes distinctly jumpy, however, when it encounters any challenge to the Church’s designation of what is sinful. Human beings (it suspects) are and always will be sinners. The Church has no problem in dealing with sinners: they should confess. Absolution may be available, dispensed by a priesthood who have privileged access to the Almighty, and can intercede. It isn’t really the commission of a sin that worries the Church. It’s the rejection of a doctrine ‘We will tell you what’s unclean in the eyes of God. We also offer a laundry service to which we hold the monopoly.’ To a cynic it might occur that this a shrewd way of drumming up trade.

One rather hopes the assisted dying bill will be talked out in the House of Lords. We have no say on matters of government policy, sovereignty, international law (and much else). But this bill is far too controversial, and personally significant, for MPs alone to adjudge. We need a touch of democratic Athens, whose citizens determined all political and legal outcomes. Citizen arbitration was used to settle most cases. Take Neaira. Not an Athenian, she had been trafficked from birth, but saving what money she earned, she eventually bought her freedom, with help from a large sum donated by the Athenian Phrynion. But she tired of him touting her around high-class orgies, took what she reckoned she was entitled to, and walked out.

Every year, thousands of stories of abuse pour into Compassion in Care, a charity that supports whistleblowers in the care sector. Volunteers manning the charity’s helpline hear of old people dismissed as ‘end of life’, deprived of food and water, abandoned in corners with neglected bedsores, needlessly sedated to make them less time-consuming. And now, says the charity’s founder and director Eileen Chubb, a former care whistleblower herself, they are bracing for ‘a massive increase in abusive cases’. That’s if the assisted suicide bill, which begins its journey through the Lords this week, becomes law. ‘We can foresee whistleblowers contacting us,’ Chubb tells me, ‘saying people died who didn’t want to die but were pushed into it, and the system failed them.

Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill has generated much talk about the ethics of suicide. As far as the ancients were concerned, it was only in life that you could make your mark. The Christian passion for embracing, even rejoicing at, death made no sense to them. Ancient thinkers generally did not fear an afterlife. Although there were no received views on the matter (unless you were a member of a cult of some sort), many ancients reckoned that, if the gods were displeased with you, they would demonstrate their hostility in this life rather than the next. But when death was inevitable, they wanted to be in control, because the way one died revealed the true stature of the person, which could do much for one’s posthumous reputation.

The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out to be a form of legislative euthanasia. MPs, looking at the process, began to resemble a patient who, having first of all declared his wish to end it all, then begins to worry that it will not be as simple or painless as he had been led to expect. It is one thing to express a fervent wish to release people from unbearable suffering and quite another to frame safe procedures which involve the state, the judiciary and the medical profession in helping people kill themselves. It was a bad mistake, too, for Labour, under Keir Starmer’s leadership, to indicate that although MPs would have a free vote, assisted suicide was a modern, cool, Labour idea.