‘James said he’d had a great life. He’d ticked all of his boxes’
In sharing her story of losing her husband, Tory MP and minister James, to lung cancer last year, Cathy Brokenshire hopes to help others, says Louise Carpenter
The day the Conservative politician and former Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire died of lung cancer, despite never having smoked a cigarette, his wife Cathy had to make the decision to turn off his ventilator. “There is no hope,” she had been told. It had been three and a half years since he was first diagnosed and his prospects, for much of that time, had been far rosier.
In the days leading up to October 7 last year, the much-loved MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup and former cabinet minister (two posts under Theresa May and most recently as securities minister for Boris Johnson), known for his integrity, commitment and quiet competence, had rung her before being placed on a ventilator and said: “I won’t be able to talk to you [soon] and I want you to know how much I love you.”
He then phoned each of their teenage children: two daughters and a son – although Cathy to this day still doesn’t know exactly what he said in these final heartbreaking conversations.
“I had to say goodbye to him then,” she remembers, “and I think I knew that he wasn’t going to make it. He told me such lovely things about his life with me. You don’t ever expect your lifelong partner to be saying those things.”
Today, Cathy Brokenshire, a widow at just 50, is recalling her husband’s death as she sits at the kitchen table of their home in his constituency on the outskirts of south-east London. Everything is spotlessly clean and in order. She has a quiet dignity – it is obvious that she is a pragmatic coper – but her grief is raw. It has not yet been 16 weeks since she lost him.
“I’m very black and white,” she says. “I know he’s gone. I miss him. I miss being able to laugh and joke with him, but at the same time, my head has computed he’s gone. It’s not like I’m sitting on the floor and I can’t cope and I can’t go outside the front door. I’m used to running family life and a household on my own. He often worked very long hours.”
Like her husband, she has never courted publicity or craved the pomp that came with his time in the spotlight. But she has invited me to her home because she wants to take up the mantle of her late husband, campaigning for the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation. Even before he died, Brokenshire had used his political profile to try to bring greater awareness to the often-missed symptoms of early lung cancer, calling for the implementation of a national screening programme. Lung cancer is the UK’s most fatal form of cancer, killing more people each year than breast, prostate and pancreatic combined. And as with James Brokenshire, 10 to 15 per cent of its sufferers have never even smoked a cigarette, despite its association with smoking (a factor of the disease which often stigmatises it).
Covid, Cathy explains, has made outcomes even worse. If early detection levels were relatively low before the pandemic, the picture now is bleaker still. Lung cancer referrals dropped by 75 per cent in the first wave. Pre-pandemic, five-year survival rates were up to 17.6 per cent; they have now fallen to 13 per cent. Lung surgery fell by a quarter, and there was an increase in sufferers presenting in A&E, which often means a late diagnosis.
Aside from the ambitious hope for a national screening programme, plans are in motion within the NHS for targeted lung health checks, a pilot programme in high-risk areas of England which aims to catch the cancer earlier. Now more than ever, Cathy stresses, it is vital that early symptoms – breathlessness, a prolonged cough – are not misattributed by the public to being the symptoms or the after-effects of Covid.
To date, she has raised more than £65,000 for the foundation through her husband’s Much Loved tribute page, a drive that is giving her grief a focus.
“If I can help one other family to not have to go through gh what I’ve been through, it’s a win,” she says.
One of the unexpected ected effects of Covid was that it meant having her husband at home e for the last year of his life. A few w of his check-up scans might ht have been delayed by the pandemic, she says, but she doesn’t think the outcome tcome could have been any different. It is thought ht the cancer returned – and nd then spread – in a very short space of time, between appointments.
Brokenshire’s final five days in the local hospital, Darent t Valley Hospital in Kent, ent, were incredibly challenging. ng. Cathy could visit for just one ne hour a day. On the second day, when doctors decided his body needed eded a ventilator, climate protesters rotesters had clogged the roads, turning urning a 10-minute journey into nto a two-and-aahalf-hour trip.
That night, when his prospects became very bleak, his wife was called to his bedside; ; she spent over six hours in the car battling to get to and from the hospital. al. The following day, as preparations preparation were being made to ventilate him, h she phoned a close friend and said: “I think I’ve spoken to my husband for the very last time.” Everywhere Everyw in the house there th are reminders reminde of James. At 53, he still st looked like a cheerful, cheerfu reliable school prefect. p He was an extremely extre close ally to Theresa Ther May, brought brough into her Cabinet Cabine as a reward for his loyalty loy and his work in the Home Office. Sajid Javid was an old friend from Exeter University (where he studied law before going g on to work in corporate cor law). His political world w was one shaped by propriety prop and courteousness. Tributes flocked in from all political persuasions. Many Ma people were in tears. “James J was always whiter than t white,” Cathy says, “He H did things the right way. He was w never about his own importance. It was never about the grandeur of the job or being Prime Minister. For him, being in politics was about helping people.
“He had a moral compass. He used to say to me, ‘I’ve got to be able to look in the mirror and justify to myself what is happening.’ He did things the right way.”
Given the current political turmoil, and the boozy Downing Street parties that were taking place while Brokenshire was dying, what does she make of the sorry state of No10 right now? “I wish I could talk to him about it,” she replies diplomatically, ever the politician’s wife.
On the wall, there is a photograph of them together, beaming at Highgrove, and some pictures of the family at Hillsborough Castle in County Down, his official residence when he was Northern Ireland Secretary – a post from which he stepped down after his first diagnosis in January 2018. The Brokenshires would eat takeaway fish and chips in the castle garden after the official tours had ended, Cathy recalls, and the children would charge around the fountain or play hide and seek while she and James drank wine.
They were, she says, devoted to one
another. “I had an incredible life with him. Idyllic. The first day I met James I knew I wanted to marry him.”
In the 31 years they were together since that first meeting, aged 20 and 23, in a pub in Chigwell, they never rowed. They never shouted. This is hard enough to believe in any marriage let alone one coping with the machinations and long hours of political life. But Cathy Brokenshire is clear: “Not one cross word, ever.
“James was so calm. It was always easy with him. He would do anything for his family but work came first sometimes and I got that.”
The couple married in 1999, at which point she worked in banking. He was first elected in 2005 as MP for
Hornchurch. It was the beginning of a new life, and as it turns out she was, not that she would say it herself, the perfect political spouse. I suspect their incredible marriage was as much to do with her as with him.
Work often took over. There were long nights at the House, and many car journeys when Cathy was keeping the children quiet in the back, while simultaneously holding the phone to James’s ear as he drove and took important calls. Margaret Thatcher’s death scuppered one daughter’s birthday party, and then the funeral delayed their wedding anniversary celebration.
But it was never an issue. “I’d say ‘OK, we’ll just celebrate at a later date’. I knew he’d always be with us if he had the choice,” she says, simply.
The round-the-clock protection officers that came with his post as Northern Ireland Secretary took some adjusting to. But even then, his gentle nature meant they all became friends. The only challenge came in late 2017/ early 2018, before Brokenshire stepped down and lost his personal protection, when the family were driven back and forth to hospital appointments – a time when all was medically uncertain.
“We’re doing a lot of hospital visits,” his protection team said, questioningly.
“And I said, ‘Oh, you know! Man of a certain age, hitting 50… MOTs and everything.’ But James and I would sit in the back of the car on the way home from an appointment unable to talk about what we’d just heard from the doctors. That was hard.”
She pauses. “He was my best friend. I had an incredible life with him.”
As if to prove it, I am drinking tea in her kitchen from a mug that reads “Every tall girl needs a short best friend” – a joke which plays to their marriage and to her marginally greater height of 5ft 10in and his nervousness whenever she wore heels. “Oh, no, not the heels!” he would exclaim.
The 2022 calendar on the wall is a collation of family life; pictures grouped on each month with February devoted to 12 official shots of Brokenshire’s youthful face. There is a treadmill in the next room, bought back in early 2018 to help bring him back to fitness after that first operation to remove a tiny top section of his right lung. The
‘If I can help one other family to not have to go through what I’ve been through, it’s a win’
‘He had a moral compass. He used to say to me, “I’ve got to be able to look in the mirror”’
cancer was discovered after he coughed up blood in December 2017, although so miniscule was the lesion that even the first CT scan was inconclusive. They had gone away on a trip of a lifetime to Australia before the conclusive results came through: “Go and make memories”, the consultant told them. “I read the worst from that,” Cathy says.
During that trip, she remembers: “James did a lot of soul searching. We didn’t know how it was going to end but we were alone overlooking the water in Sydney Harbour and he said, ‘I can tell you I’m happy and content, and I’ve done what I intended. I’ve got you, I’ve got amazing kids. I became an MP before I was 40, and so I have ticked all my boxes. This could go either way, but I’m happy and I’ve had a great life.’ Yeah, we just hugged it out.”
After the initial operation, deemed a complete success at the time, there was much hope and relief. “We could say to the children, ‘This is something that is happening and he’s getting treatment.’” James resumed his political career. Three years passed. The children got on with school in lockdown, nobody dwelt on his health apart from Cathy worrying about the effect of Covid. “But I think James always thought it might come back.”
He was right. It was to return in January 2021, picked up in scans which had continued – albeit delayed – throughout the pandemic. He coughed up blood again and the cancer was confirmed to have returned on January 8, his 53rd birthday. He had his right lung removed the following week. By June last year, it was clear the cancer had spread, and, in July, James resigned from Boris Johnson’s government. “It was his conscience. He didn’t want anything to happen under his watch while he was recovering at home,” says Cathy. Even then they were told “this isn’t the end of the road”. But, as it turned out, it was.
Their eldest daughter is now at Edinburgh University, reading German and history. Their second daughter, who was by her mother’s side when they turned off the ventilator, is in her first year of sixth form. Their son is doing his GCSEs this year. She is well supported by friends, and everywhere in the constituency people approach her to provide consolation. Cathy Brokenshire is, it seems, as loved in Bexley as her husband was.
As I leave, I spy two huge Lego constructions in the sitting room. The first is of Tower Bridge and the other of the Houses of Parliament, models lovingly built by a politician and his children. James Brokenshire’s legacy is huge, but somehow in his home, these models are the perfect embodiment of how he managed to blend professional and family life: a good politician, a good father and, for Cathy, the very best husband she could have wished for.