DOMINIC LAWSON: Esther Rantzen and the assisted dying lobby are taking their scare tactics too far

Members of Parliament tell me they have never experienced such aggressive and incessant lobbying, on any issue, as they have over the past few weeks from Dignity In Dying.

This is the organisation, formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, behind the 'Assisted Dying' Bill that was introduced in the name of Kim Leadbeater.

The Labour MP had never previously expressed any interest in the matter, but when she came top of the ballot for private members' Bills, Dignity In Dying swooped and persuaded her to turn their decades-long campaign into proposed legislation (which will be put to a vote a week on Friday).

However, in becoming the instrument of this movement, Leadbeater has revealed her naivety (to put it politely).

Last month, on BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, she declared: 'The current situation, for people who are terminally ill, is you've got three options. You can suffer and have a very difficult, very painful death; you can go to Switzerland with Dignitas; and the other option is you can take your own life. So there are three options: suffering, Switzerland or suicide.'

I hadn't known this until my wife Rosa heard about it from Rachel Street, the chief executive of the Heart Of Kent Hospice (which Rosa's family has supported for many years). She told Rosa that she had 'shouted at the radio' when listening to Leadbeater.

Later Rachel emailed: 'Speaking personally, I was so frustrated at the lack of awareness that there is such a thing as a comfortable death, and that she hadn't referred to palliative and end of life care, or hospices at all, and was dramatising death and dying – probably terrifying people who are facing a terminal illness even more.'

At that time, it was considered very likely that Parliament would pass the Leadbeater Bill. There is a massive Labour majority, subjected to what has been described as a 'soft whipping operation' – principally based on the fact that Sir Keir Starmer had voted for such a measure when it was last put to MPs, and had 'promised' Esther Rantzen (no less) that he would assist the process of such a measure on to the statute book.

But to Rantzen's fury, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, who formerly supported legalisation of so-called 'assisted dying' , has said he no longer thinks it can be safely legislated, and had become increasingly aware of the way vulnerable people could feel under insidious social pressure to end their lives prematurely.

Rantzen, who has stage 4 lung cancer, wrote in an open letter: 'What kind of Health Minister are you if you have no respect or understanding for the views of terminally ill patients?' She accused Streeting of wanting to 'force me to fly to Dignitas in Zurich to die alone'.

Earlier, she had said that even if the law is changed, 'I will probably not get the chance to die in my favourite place, my New Forest cottage'.

Yet, as the law stands, no one can prevent Esther from dying in her New Forest cottage, if that is what she most desires. No one, despite what her lobby constantly says, is forced to have any medical treatment they don't want. And no one can be made to go to a hospital, if they prefer to end their days in their own home.

Rantzen has already lived (happily, as far as one can tell) for longer than she expected. This is relevant to the phrasing of Leadbeater's Bill, which talks of making a medically 'assisted' death (being given poison) available for those with a terminal illness and a prognosis of being within six months of dying.

Professor Mark Glaser, the former head of cancer services at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, told The Mail on Sunday: 'I can recall several patients who came to me with a prognosis of months, and they are still being cared for many years later.'

One of his patients was the former Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam: 'Mo didn't live the six months, the 12 months or the 15 which her prognosis... said about her case. Dr Mowlam lived for eight years – and, after her exit from politics, she had a productive and useful life.'

It is, in fact, an overwhelming sense of being 'useless', or of their life having no value, which typically assails people when they receive a terminal diagnosis.

This was explained to me by Dr Matthew Doré, the honorary secretary of the Association of Palliative Medicine for Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He added that this makes patients 'intensely vulnerable' to the sense that whatever remained of their life was merely a burden to their families, or society.

And Dr Doré is deeply sceptical of the notion that doctors or judges could detect if a patient's demand for 'assisted dying' had been subtly, or not so subtly, suggested by others (family, for example).

In fact, Leadbeater's Bill explicitly permits medics to introduce the idea to patients.

Leadbeater claims her Bill has the 'world's strictest safeguards': it requires the 'assisted death' to be approved by two doctors and a High Court judge. But how much would these doctors know of the personal circumstances?

Dr Phil Whitaker, who has long supported the principle of 'assisted dying', wrote in the New Statesman: 'Leadbeater's Bill is the right legislation at exactly the wrong time... A doctor who knows their patient well – not just their medical case but also their character, opinions, relationships, belief and circumstances – is best placed to ensure any decision to request assisted dying is well-founded. [But] that kind of doctor-patient relationship... is now the exception.'

Actually, the Bill doesn't even specify that the doctors have any previous acquaintance with the patient.

As for the judges, that aspect of Leadbeater's 'world's strictest safeguards' has been torpedoed by Sir James Munby, former head of the Family Division of the High Court.

Last week, he said the architects of her Bill had 'chosen to promote a highly unsatisfactory scheme... a scheme which does not provide an open and transparent process, but, on the contrary, permits a secret process which can give us no confidence that it will enable the court to identify and prevent possible abuses'.

A similar point is made by Thomas Teague KC, who this year retired as the Chief Coroner of England and Wales. One of numerous distinguished legal experts endorsing a report by the Policy Exchange think-tank exposing the Bill's inadequacies, Teague observed: 'Many of the safeguards promised by its supporters amount to nothing more than arbitrary restrictions, with no rational foundation.'

But that, actually, is the point: these safeguards are designed to be a box-ticking exercise, not an investigatory process. This is reminiscent of the debate over the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act, itself the outcome of a private member's Bill introduced by the then 28-year-old Liberal MP David Steel.

That Bill's supporters insisted the requirement that two doctors approve a termination would ensure this would not become 'abortion on demand'.

But it rapidly became just that. And Leadbeater's Bill, which affects the living rather than the unborn, would introduce death on demand.

For a number of powerful and strong-minded individuals, such as Esther Rantzen, that would come as an unmitigated benefit. But for the more vulnerable, it could become a terrible added affliction.