I sent my dear friend Dame Esther Rantzen a private text yesterday. I didn’t know if she’d be able to read it. The media was buzzing with her daughter Rebecca Wilcox’s heartbreaking news that the “miracle” drug keeping her mother alive is no longer working and she is now too ill to travel to end her life, as she wanted to, at Swiss clinic Dignitas. Swiftly, I received a response – five kisses. I know she summoned the strength to send them herself. Esther is not the woman to relinquish control of her phone, even in extremis.
Most of us muddle through our lives, struggling for equilibrium, focused on keeping ourselves and our families afloat. Occasionally we spare a passing thought, or a few quid for others, but in the main our daily energy is expended on our own personal survival. Esther is not like the rest of us. Despite normal ups and downs and personal adversity – particularly the loss of adored husband Desmond in 2000 – she has transformed other people’s lives for the better.
Childline, founded by her in 1986 and now run by the NSPCC, gave abused, neglected children unprecedented access to counselling via telephone. At that time child sexual abuse was taboo, hidden behind a wall of silence. Esther gave children the means to express the unthinkable. Wherever she went in the near 40 years that followed, grateful adults dashed to her to thank her for the light Childline shone in their bleakest days.
Esther is unstoppable. In 2013, and saddened by isolation and despair experienced by the elderly, she founded Silverline. Those living alone gained telephone chums and a good old chinwag. Delighted Silverliners reported they perked up tremendously having someone interesting and interested at the end of a phone. The dame had waved her empathetic wand a second time.
She hoped to score a hat-trick with the Assisted Dying Bill. Facing terminal lung cancer, Esther wanted to give the sick and ailing control over their fate. Of course, she demanded stringent rules to prevent the vulnerable being preyed upon, but her contention – borne out by every phone-in I have ever conducted on BBC and LBC – was that some people want autonomy over the length of time they will suffer and the date and manner of their passing.
What a shame Sir Keir Starmer has shelved his promise to Esther and pushed back the Bill to 2029. It would have been the ultimate legacy in her stellar line-up.
