Two weeks before the General Election in 1987 David Young, the man appointed to run the Conservatives’ re-election campaign, walked into Margaret Thatcher’s office with a fistful of new polls. They made gloomy reading. The election was going to be close – and might even be lost. The three big helpers of the 1983 campaign (Michael Foot, the SDP and General Galtieri) had all disappeared and, anyway, people were beginning to get a bit fed up of Margaret herself. Panic ensued. That day entered political history as “wobbly Thursday”.
The panic was misplaced. The polls were wrong. Margaret Thatcher was returned as Prime Minister with a large majority.
Campaigners for the current Bill seem to have had their own wobbly Thursday last week. High-ranking Ministers were falling over themselves to withdraw their support. Newly-elected Labour MPs who had been assumed to be supportive were suddenly saying they weren’t. Leading Conservative supporters seemed to be few in number.
Of course, the campaigners should have foreseen some of this and of course they have made some mistakes along the way. In its endeavour to guard against coercion, the Bill now contains more safeguards than the Mona Lisa – rendering it potentially useless for many patients. And surely the need for a High Court Judge to be included in the process was a guaranteed turn-off for the five MPs responsible for the Judiciary ?
However, it also seems likely that the panic will once again prove to have been unnecessary. The level of support from the public remains strong. The supporters of the Bill seem to be winning the “ground campaign” (i.e. e-mails and letters to local MPs) and it will take a really insensitive MP to tell a constituent that nothing can be done to help dying people who are in pain, acute distress and now devoid of dignity. If this Bill is lost then the whole issue of assisted dying in England and Wales will be off the agenda for at least five years. How much extra suffering would that cause ?
