Terminally ill journalist and assisted dying supporter no longer healthy enough to travel to Dignitas

Esther Rantzen in 2022.

The life-preserving cancer drugs that Dame Esther Rantzen was placed on last year are no longer working, her daughter has said.

The health of the terminally ill Childline founder and journalist had deteriorated to the extent that she was no longer well enough to travel to a Swiss clinic, meaning that Dignitas was “out of the window” for the 84-year-old, Rebecca Wilcox said.

Wilcox told 5 News: “Frankly, Dignitas is out of the window for us as well. You have to be relatively healthy to do that. If she had gone, she would have gone months before she would have died here.”

Rantzen, a longtime supporter of assisted dying, was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in 2023. She was thought to have just weeks to live, but last year started using a “wonder drug” that helped her survive against the odds.

When asked if her mother was “still improving”, Wilcox said: “I really wish that was true, but I don’t think that’s the case any more.”

Rebecca Wilcox, Rantzen’s daughter.
Rebecca Wilcox, Rantzen’s daughter. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian

News of Rantzen’s deteriorating health comes in the same week that the assisted dying bill was pushed back until 2029, creating a delay that supportive MPs fear could mean the change of law is never realised.

In November last year, the television personality told MPs “my time is running out”, but the issue was one “the public care desperately about”, and said it might not be debated by MPs for another decade if the legislation did not pass.

Responding to the bill’s delay, Wilcox said: “I just wish that people understood that all the assisted dying bill is, is choice for people that want it.

“All it is, is giving you peace of mind and that peace of mind, I cannot tell you how powerful that would be right now for my mum.”

She said she had watched her mother suffer “trauma” over the uncertainty of her deteriorating health.

“The fact that she doesn’t know how her death is going to happen, how the pain is going to progress, the exhaustion, the fatigue, what symptoms are going to come in,” she said.

“She is a person who has fought her whole life for other people, and she has no control now. Why can’t we give people like my mum with a terminal diagnosis, with no other choice, some choice as to when and how and where they die?”

Earlier this week Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP piloting the assisted dying bill through parliament, proposed the delay, meaning the initial timeline of two years for implementing the law will now stretch to four.

The delay marks the latest major change to the assisted dying proposals, which have proven contentious in the Commons and beyond.

A spokesperson for Leadbeater said she “hopes and believes the service can be delivered more quickly”, but that the changes made to the bill since last autumn meant it would “inevitably take longer to implement”.

On Tuesday, the Isle of Man’s parliament approved a bill to legalise assisted dying, making it the first place in the British Isles to introduce the change.