No MP could have championed assisted dying legislation more than brave Esther

There was a parliamentary debate in Westminster this week about assisted dying, largely at the instigation of Esther Rantzen. It was she who prompted the petition for the debate (though a law won’t be passed at this point). Many tributes were paid to the effectiveness that the former TV presenter had brought to her final campaign.

Esther, 84 in June, announced last year that she had terminal lung cancer (incidentally, she was never a smoker) and would take herself off to Dignitas in Switzerland if Britain didn’t facilitate a chosen death for those with a mortal illness or facing unbearable pain.

Esther, who I’ve known, not well, but casually, since the 1970s, stood for parliament as an independent in 2009. She attracted just over 4pc of the Luton vote and lost her deposit.

But she has been far more influential as a big personality who won fame through her successful TV programmes like That’s Life, as well as her campaigns and charity work, than she would ever have as a politician. It’s the politicians who defer to Esther.

She has a wide fan club: she is Queen Esther to her circle of friends and admirers. The pioneering work she has done in launching Childline, campaigning for organ donors, innovating video links for child witnesses in court, starting a helpline for the elderly and isolated, The Silver Line, has been ground-breaking.

And if Esther is now using her own terminal illness to crusade for assisted dying – she will win her cause, if it’s the last thing she does (which she cheerfully says it will be, while asking the public for uplifting funeral suggestions).

But she has critics too. For them, she is Madame Bossyboots – a woman of such strong character that she dominates every milieu she enters. She is also Baroness Self-Publicity – she has been so open about so many aspects of her own life experiences, from post-natal depression to post-widowed dating, from her daughter’s ME illness to the joys of sanctifying her marriage in a synagogue, it’s all fearlessly there, in the public realm.

When she announced in a blaze of publicity that she had booked herself into Dignitas, some greeted it as a “great career move”. Friends doubt she will actually go to Dignitas because, paradoxically, she really loves life and will savour it for as long as possible. (She is receiving an “amazing” new drug that is containing the cancer.)

But, fair play to her, she has turned a personal affliction into an energetic campaign that has attracted public and parliamentary support. She was also a key influence in changing the British Medical Association’s policy on assisted dying.

And Esther is a self-made success: she began working at the BBC as a secretary and clerk and graduated to researcher. Her break came in the late 1960s on the consumer programme

Braden’s Week, fronted by the wise-cracking Canadian Bernard Braden. She appeared on-camera showing flair and nerve, and Mr Braden presently disappeared back to Canada, and the format became Esther’s own, with

That’s Life soon attracting 18 million viewers.

When I mentioned Esther’s career path to Bernard Braden’s wife, Barbara Kelly (older readers may recall she appeared on Eamonn Andrews’ What’s My Line?), there was a rolling of the eyes and unhappy references to how her husband was displaced by Esther’s ambition. Yet, it’s an old story of the rising star replacing the fading star, the apprentice overtaking the master.

Esther came to dominate the BBC, along with her husband, the award-winning documentary-maker Desmond Wilcox. The end of his marriage to Patsy, formerly Esther’s best friend, was also played out in public. Patsy didn’t want a divorce, but yielded when Esther became pregnant. And soon, the first wife faded from view, although Patsy’s daughter remained critical of the situation.

Desmond was evidently so committed to Esther that he converted to Judaism – quite a challenge, since Jews don’t seek converts. For a man, it can involve circumcision. After Desmond’s death in 2000, Esther took up the cause of widows and older women seeking new partners, concluding, as many an older woman has done, that when you’re in your 60s, a good man is hard to find. But her energies never flagged, and she became the patron of 55 charities and also dauntlessly performed on Strictly Come Dancing.

I admire and respect her – she has written thoughtfully about death – but I’m not with Team Esther on assisted dying. She has advanced what I consider a silly argument for her cause – that her pet dog’s painless euthanasia is how people should die. Pets don’t leave wills and estates, can’t give consent and aren’t put into care homes for years, costing money. Moreover, we kill animals to eat them – that’s hardly a parallel.

But who am I to argue with the all-powerful Esther? What Esther commands, goes.