The assisted suicide bill should not survive

Until about six months ago, it would have been hard to find a more inoffensive politician than the Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater. A well-liked, upbeat, down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman, she entered politics because of a personal tragedy, the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox, in 2016. When asked on a Spectator podcast what was the worst piece of advice she had ever received, Leadbeater half-joked: ‘Have you thought about being an MP?’ Visibly a normal, friendly person plunked down in SW1, she won many admirers and attracted little controversy.

Then in September Leadbeater came top of the private members’ ballot and chose to take up the cause of assisted suicide. The current law, she argued, is cruel to those dying in terrible pain. With the Prime Minister quietly supportive, and celebrities such as Esther Rantzen vocally backing her, it seemed the perfect moment.

So how did we end up here? Six months after Leadbeater launched the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a group of Labour MPs have pronounced it ‘irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law’. It’s ‘becoming beyond a joke’, according to the Tory MP John Lamont. Leadbeater’s bill has been hectically rushed, then frantically delayed, and somewhere along the way has lost its biggest safeguard, the inclusion of a High Court judge. The seasoned policy expert Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, says he has ‘never seen a bill less up to scratch’. For some, the imbroglio threatens to overshadow the government’s own reforms. ‘It’s become an embarrassment,’ says one Labour MP. ‘It’s more than a mess. A mess is something you can fix.’