It’s my life. If I want to die that’s my right and I don’t see why you should stop me...

The strident words of Prue Leith, at loggerheads with her Tory MP son as Britain – and Ireland – consider changing the law on assisted dying

THE long, slim refectory table in Prue Leith’s Cotswolds home has seen many vigorous family debates but none so divisive as this. It is a matter of life and death for Prue on one side and her Tory MP son Danny Kruger on the other.

The chef, writer and beloved Bake Off judge wants to see assisted dying legalised in the UK. She is a patron of campaign group Dignity In Dying and, since she will turn 83 on Saturday, it’s a pressing personal issue. Danny, 48, chairs Dying Well, the all-party parliamentary group campaigning against it.

‘It’s my life. If I want to die, that’s my right and I don’t see why you should stop me,’ Prue tells him.

‘The law drives desperately ill people one of three ways. They can grin and bear it. They can commit suicide – which is very lonely. Or they can go to Dignitas [the Swiss assisted-dying clinic] and who, frankly, wants to travel to an industrial estate outside Zurich to die in a soulless room?

‘Switzerland, suicide, or suffering? I think that’s a lousy choice.

‘I would rather die like most dogs die, with a lethal injection. Out in seconds instead of suffering for months or years in agony.’

Danny is equally blunt: ‘Assisted dying – it’s not healthcare, it’s an execution,’ he tells his mother.

‘You can dress it up by talking about doctors and syringes but it is a deliberate decision to end a life. It’s a very, very sinister scenario in which there is a cadre of state employees who decide who should live and who should die.

‘We are incapable of doing this safely. In every jurisdiction where assisted dying is available, it is abused. There are people for whom we would regret it happening.’

His mum asks him: ‘Is it a lot?’ To which Danny replies: ‘How many is acceptable?’

Oddly, at the heart of their argument is agreement: everyone is entitled to a good death. What the pair are fighting about is the best way to achieve this. They’ve made a joint documentary about the issue, to be broadcast on Channel 4 this week. Assisted dying is legally available to millions of people in more than 27 jurisdictions around the world.

It involves either a self-administered draught of fatal drugs or a doctor inserting an intravenous line and injecting anti-anxiety medication, a local anaesthetic, a coma inducing agent and finally a paralytic, bringing death in minutes.

Prue and Danny explore the issue in America and Canada where, on wealthy Vancouver Island, they discover that 7.5% of all deaths are today by assisted dying. (As Danny says in the film: ‘You can now be stoned, and killed legally, all the way up America’s West Coast. That’s democracy!’)

In Ireland and the UK, suicide is legal but having the help of a medical professional to die is not. Assisted dying is currently the subject of a UK Parliamentary inquiry while, in Ireland, a special Oireachtas committee has been formed to look into the issue.

Prue has been in the vanguard of a UK shift to help the terminally-ill avoid suffering since she watched her older brother David dying in agony from bone cancer 10 years ago. His suffering was so great his daughter later admitted she’d tried to summon the courage to suffocate him with a pillow.

‘His wife was sitting there, saying “just die, just die”,’ Prue reveals in the documentary.

SHE goes on to say: ‘I went to David’s consultant and asked: “Can’t you give him more morphine?” He said: “You realise morphine is addictive?” By then, my brother had three weeks to live. It was horrible. Wrong.

‘It was humiliating and dreadful for a grown man to be reduced to weeping and begging for pain relief and not getting it.’

Danny is deeply sympathetic to his uncle’s plight and the impact it had on his mother. But he thinks that as Prue is blessed with good health, wealthy enough to buy help if she needs it and supported by a loving family, she is in a privileged position. His concern is for more vulnerable sections of society – those who are sick, lonely, impoverished or struggling with their mental health, who might one day be covered by assisted dying legislation.

He fears new laws could give licence to people – albeit a very small minority – ‘who want to bump off relatives, or homicidal doctors, because we know they exist’. And he frets that within the bureaucracy of the UK’s NHS, fragile lives might become a kind of currency to free up beds and other limited resources.

‘There are lots of people, my mum for example, for whom assisted dying feels like a right anybody should have. Their concern is the legitimate fear of a very unpleasant ending,’ he concedes. ‘I respect that. However, once you’ve started down the road of allowing doctors to decide that some people are better off dead, you will inevitably end up expanding the criteria.

‘People will find a way to include those for whom it was never intended. People might find themselves under pressure to take the option of assisted dying. There are many who feel themselves to be an expensive burden – whether that’s on their family or the healthcare system.

Interjecting, Prue tells her son: ‘All your objections are hypothetical. They are about what might go wrong. I think we should pass this law quite narrowly, so that when an adult who is compos mentis [in complete control of their mind] and who is terminally-ill wants assisted dying, they can have it.

‘It should not be beyond the wit of man,’ (by which Prue means lawmakers and parliamentarians such as Danny) ‘and the experts involved to design a safe system.’

She concedes that some might slip through the net but argues ‘there are multiple legitimate reasons why people want to end their lives, such as being a burden on your family’.

Speaking directly to her son, Prue says, ‘If I was dying and you were having to stump up all your money for me, and your sister was having to look after me every day, and I was in pain and hating my life, then, yes, I’d want to save you from all of that’.

Prue married Danny’s father Rayne Kruger, a South African property developer and author in 1974, and the couple also adopted a one-year-old girl, Li-Da, from Cambodia. She is now a filmmaker.

Rayne died aged 80 in 2002 and a decade later, Prue met retired clothes designer John Playfair, seven years her junior, and they married in 2016.

Prue wonders if Danny’s strong faith – in contrast to his parents’ atheism – has influenced his attitude towards assisted dying.

Danny flatly denies it. He describes his parents as ‘children of the 20th Century’ who were ‘very informed by the idea of personal freedom and that life is what you make of it’. He says they were ‘rational and materialists in the good sense’. Although he believes that this was an ‘ultimately unsatisfactory doctrine’.

For his part, he says: ‘My faith doesn’t mean I have some sort of weird, pro-life attitude where life must be preserved at all costs, though mum thinks I do. I don’t see any value or virtue in suffering.’

In fact, Danny considers himself the practical one compared with his mother, who he thinks is the ideologue in this argument.

Unsurprisingly, making the TV documentary did nothing to change either’s view as they both found evidence to support their own opinion. After their interview, Danny has to return to London. He gives his mum a hug and a kiss. They may be on opposing sides of an intellectual and moral divide but they are united in their love and respect for each other.

Prue Leith: I’d rather die like most dogs – with a lethal injection

Prue’s son Danny: A new law could license people to bump off relatives

■ Prue and Danny’s Death Road Trip, Channel 4, Thursday, 9pm. news@mailonsunday.ie