‘It was an odd day – a hard, emotional day of effectively saying goodbye’
James Brokenshire tells Steven Swinford of leaving Parliament for lung surgery and his moving return
James Brokenshire was enjoying a weekend break with his family in Northern Ireland last September when the first warning sign came. Despite being fit, healthy and a non-smoker, he started to cough up blood – the result of something he would later discover to be a cancerous lesion on his lung that would require life-saving surgery.
It was the beginning of a six-month ordeal that made him re-assess his life and career, forcing him to give up his job in Theresa May’s Cabinet and put himself and his family first.
“It makes you take a step back and think about what is important,” he told The Daily Telegraph in his first interview since returning to the House of Commons this week.
“Health is imperative, but also family and your responsibilities to them,” he said. “It does remind you of your fallibility at times like this but that was always there. I am strong, I am resilient, I look to the future with confidence.”
Today he takes the opportunity to thank family and colleagues for their “love and support” and to hint that he wants to return to the Cabinet.
He also supports Baroness Jowell, the Labour peer who has brain cancer, and wants terminally ill patients to be allowed to take experimental drugs. His return to work marks a remarkable recovery for the former Northern Ireland secretary whose future looked anything but certain when he resigned last month.
The 50-year-old said it had been “slightly surreal” the day he coughed blood into a tissue. That weekend in Ulster was intended as a much-needed break from the intensity of trying to restore power-sharing at Stormont.
“I felt fine,” he says. “But I did need to follow this through.”
As soon as he returned from Northern Ireland he booked an appointment with his GP, who sent him for tests including X-rays and CT scans. They found nothing amiss.
A consultant at St Thomas’ Hospital in London arranged a bronchoscopy, an invasive lung examination, which took place on Dec 7 – the day the Prime Minister announced her breakthrough in the first phase of Brexit talks, a process with which Mr Brokenshire had been intimately involved.
He only told Mrs May about his hospital appointment the day before. “We were working out of Downing Street into the later hours,” he recalls. “I said, ‘I can’t be around tomorrow because I’ve got a bronchoscopy’.
“I could have said ‘do you know what, I’ve got all these things going on, can we put this [hospital appointment] off for a week or two?’ I could have just said no.
“But I went off to have the bronchoscopy. It was a no-brainer.”
He worked until midnight, watched the big Brexit announcement on television the following morning, and went to St Thomas’, where the lesion was discovered. It was only when he returned from a Christmas holiday in Australia with his wife and children that he was told the lesion could be cancerous and he needed surgery that would remove part of his right lung.
He says: “It was a once in a lifetime trip, but this was still very much hanging over you. The mind starts to race at that point. You are thinking about all the what-ifs… about what the worst-case scenario would be.
“Of course you think about family, the future, not knowing what you are dealing with at that point. That period in some ways was the hardest.”
Once he knew he needed surgery, with a potential recovery period of months, he told Mrs May he could not continue in Cabinet.
“We spoke on the phone,” he said. “We had two or three conversations but concluded that I needed to stand down, that I felt that was the right thing not just for me but in the best interests of Northern Ireland and the Government as a whole.”
Mrs May, he says, could not have been kinder and more supportive. “She is very human, very supportive and genuinely concerned about my health and well-being. I could not have wanted or expected any greater support from the Prime Minister at this really difficult time in my personal life.” When he announced his resignation on Jan 8, only a handful of people knew about his illness, but suddenly it became very public.
“It came as a huge shock not just to colleagues here but more generally. It was a really odd day, a hard, emotional day of effectively saying goodbye.” His surgery came a week later, and the procedure was such a success that just one month later Mr Brokenshire was back in his office and getting to grips with life as a backbencher.
Since his return to the Commons this week he has been inundated with messages of support from all sides of the house. Mr Brokenshire says he has been humbled by the experience. “This is an uncompromising place at times. The cut and thrust of frontline politics is like that. But this place equally can be incredibly warm. They show you that sort of emotional, human side. It has meant a lot, at a difficult, c----y time when you’re not sure where things are going to go.”
He puts his recovery down to his wife Cathy, their three children and the immense outpouring of support he received. The letters, emails and cards flooded in. But throughout it all, he has been guided by his faith.
“My faith has been important to me,” he said. “Having faith, having that strength – you know that there are others, whether that be in your local church community or others, that
‘Of course you think about family, the future, not knowing what you are dealing with. That period in some ways was the hardest’
have been praying for you.”
He has also spoken in favour of Baroness Jowell’s calls for terminally ill cancer patients to be given access to “novel” treatments.
“Thinking through on novel therapies that are there, how they can be more accessible?” he says, but adds: “Of course, equally ensuring you are not abusing that situation and taking advantage of people in hard, difficult circumstances.
“But I think we do need to challenge the thinking around all of this and assess what more can be done.”
Asked if he wants to return to the Cabinet, Mr Brokenshire insists he is taking it one day at a time. “I’m taking things step by step, finding my feet, making sure I’m fit and well. I’ll see where it takes me. But there is still plenty in the tank.”
♦donations to the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation can be made at www.roycastle.org or by calling 03333237200