Lord’s daughter collapses and dies at just 24
Father wrote 1945 Labour poll manifesto
THE daughter of the Labour peer who drafted the party’s 1945 manifesto has died suddenly after complaining of a headache.
Gaia Young, 24, excused herself to lie down for what she thought was heatstroke but an hour later she was ‘viciously vomiting’.
Her family called an ambulance and paramedics rushed her to hospital. Sixteen hours later she was declared brain dead and never regained consciousness. Her 63-year-old mother Dorit, the third wife of Lord Young of Dartington, said her daughter had passed the day with a bike ride and clothes shopping.
She invited a friend over for dinner before suddenly leaving the table, Mrs Young told London’s Evening Standard. ‘We didn’t even notice it at first,’ she added.
‘Then she rings through the landline to say “Mum I have a very bad headache, I’m in the front room”.
‘Gaia herself thought she had a heatstroke. But an hour later she was viciously vomiting and by 9.30pm the ambulance came, I sat in there with her.’
Gai, who had no underlying health conditions, was put on a ventilator at University College London Hospital but could not be saved and died the following day.
A post-mortem examination was inconclusive and the death of Gaia – half-sister of columnist and free speech campaigner Toby Young – is being treated as unexplained.
Lord Young, who coined the term ‘meritocracy’ and was described by Tony Blair as ‘not just a great thinker but a great doer’, died in 2002 aged 86 when she was just five.
He wrote the Labour Party’s ‘Let Us Face the Future’ manifesto which ushered Clement Attlee’s government into power, playing a key role in shaping the post-war welfare state.
The academic was also behind the launch of the Consumers’ Association, Which? magazine, the National Consumer Council and the Open University.
In his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, he gave the term negative rather than positive connotations, fearing its pursuit would lead to an arrogant elite ruling over the discontented masses.
Gaia, a Bristol history graduate, had been researching her genealogy for a book about her father over the past two years.
Mrs Young, a hatmaker of Islington, north London, said: ‘In the last years, she reminded me so much of Michael, I knew she always had his mind and she was a beautiful girl.
‘I would like to continue the book but I don’t have her brain or her phenomenal memory for detail of the family tree.’ Mrs Young discovered Gaia had been donating to the Skid Row Running Club after becoming incensed about poverty in Los Angeles when she travelled across the United States by public transport.
She found a letter from the chairman of the charity thanking Gaia for her generosity. Three days before she died Gaia gave nine inches of her hair to the Little Princess Trust to make wigs for cancer patients.
Mrs Young said she and her daughter were a ‘formidable team’ adding: ‘The moment Gaia saw someone in need she would move into action. That is exactly something her dad used to do. She was following in his footsteps. There is no end to what she could have achieved.’
Busayo Agbetuyi, 25, one of Gaia’s friends from Camden School for Girls, has set up a fundraiser aiming to raise £15,000 for causes she supported throughout her life.
Paying tribute, she said: ‘When she was very excited she would literally jump for joy, she would do this little skip. It was so wholesome to see. And if she had her heart set on doing something she would do it.’
The GoFundMe account she set up had last night raised £8,955 for charity.
‘Following in his footsteps’