I still feel pain as my baby boy didn’t need to die EXCLUSIVE BY ANNE DIAMOND

25 YEARS SINCE LOOSE

THE cot death of baby son Sebastian led TV presenter Anne Diamond to drive a campaign which changed the face of Britain and saved the lives of tens of thousands of other children.

Here, 25 years on from the Back to Sleep crusade, she shares the enduring legacy of the little boy she lost. IT’s hard to think that 25 years ago this month, we used to lose five or six children every day in this country to the demon killer known as cot death. That’s around 2,000 a year but parents were told that, though it was a terrible tragedy, they should accept it as one of those things. “Cheer up and have another one”, people used to say.

I know – because it was said to me many times after my son Sebastian died at home in his cot, where he should have been safe and sound.

I call it the demon killer because it was like a murderer in the night, who crept into babies’ bedrooms and stole away their lives without leaving a trace.

Now, 25 years on, my little boy would be a strapping lad like his brothers and I know exactly how he’d look.

The musings of a bereaved mum, maybe. But the pain of loss is nearer the surface than I sometimes think. Witness how I was simply mentioning the anniversary recently on ITV’s Loose Women and I started to well up.

Once a mum who had lost her child many years before to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome told me: “After time the pain goes, but the love never does.”

I’m not sure the pain ever does go, actually. Nor the sense of injustice. Because, as I later learned, Sebastian didn’t have to die. We could have saved him – the trouble was, we weren’t living in either New Zealand or Bristol.

The story of the Back to Sleep cot death campaign is still an extraordinary tale. And I thank my journalistic training for enabling me to play a part in kicking the Government into action. It is still