Dame Esther Rantzen: I am making arrangements to travel alone to Dignitas

Dame Esther Rantzen has said she wishes her family could travel with her to Dignitas to “see that I have a good death” as she confirmed she is “making arrangements” to go by herself.

The Childline founder and former broadcaster, who is terminally ill with cancer, first revealed in December 2023 that she had joined the assisted dying clinic in Switzerland and at that point said she might travel there “if the next scan says nothing’s working”.

The 85-year-old has been a leading voice in the campaign to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, and has urged Lords not to block the passage of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill as it was debated on Friday.

Dame Esther, who has said any change in the current law in England would likely be too late to help her, is among the high-profile critics of the law as it stands, branding it “cruel”.

She previously spoke of how her family could not travel to Dignitas with her “because otherwise they are liable to being accused of killing me and they get investigated by the police, so that’s just messy and wrong and not what we want”.

Speaking to ITV’s Good Morning Britain on Friday, she said: “I’m making arrangements because it’s the only way I can have an assisted death, to go by myself to Zurich, to Dignitas.

“I just wish that I was allowed to say goodbye to my family and for them to see that I have a good death.”

She said her fear is not of death itself but of pain and suffering at the end.

She told GMB: “I’m not afraid of death but I am, as someone once said, afraid of dying. I’m afraid of dying badly.”

In a plea to the peers debating the Bill she said: “Please, House of Lords, give us terminally ill patients the hope, the confidence, the choice that if life gets unbearable, they can ask for help.”

During Friday’s debate, Labour peer Lord Falconer – who is leading the Bill through the Lords – warned that patients who currently attempt to take their own lives “seek to evade the law, and therefore evade the protections”.

He told the Lords: “If the patient wanted to take control of the time of their own death, they are, under the current law, legally entitled to take their own life.

“But they must do so without any assistance, often horribly.”

Lord Falconer added: “Others go to Dignitas, often alone because those who accompany them from England fear the consequences of the criminal law.”

He said: “It is right and possible to pass a law which allows those who are terminally ill to die with dignity and at a time of their own choosing without the fear and the horror I have described.

“And with appropriate safeguards in law, not, as currently, where people in order to have a death at their own choosing seek to evade the law, and therefore evade the protections.”