Patricia Hewitt wants the right to kill herself. The former Health Secretary is not remotely ill: rushing from meeting to meeting in her Leicester constituency yesterday, she was frantic with energy.

But for many years she has been “troubled” when contemplating her mortality and the dilemmas of people whose relatives find life unbearable.

Two years since leaving her Cabinet post, she has mounted her first big campaign: to get a legal right for people to assist their own death. Why?

“What has really helped me make my mind up on this is thinking: what would I want if I found myself diagnosed with a crippling illness that I knew to be terminal?

“I don’t know what decision I would make, whether I would want to die, but I absolutely know that I would want that choice.”

At the moment, that would probably mean travelling to Switzerland to die with the assistance of the organisation Dignitas, which would put her relatives in a legally hazy position. The first step in her campaign is an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill, which would protect those who take loved ones abroad to die. It may be debated in the House of Commons next week.

What Ms Hewitt really wants — and is determined will come “sooner rather than later” — is a Private Member’s Bill that would make assisted dying legal in Britain. To many this comes as a surprise. It was not a cause that she supported as Health Secretary and, given Gordon Brown’s opposition to such a law, it is not a stand expected of such a loyal politician.

But for her, it comes full circle to her successful campaigns on abortion law in the 1970s. With our ageing population, more people want similar control over their bodies and their lives. This, 40 years on from the Abortion Act, is a “right to choose” movement of our times.

“I haven’t spoken on this before, that is quite right,” Ms Hewitt said. “But when I was Health Secretary, I had been reading accounts of families who had found themselves in that position. I tried to put myself in their shoes.”

So, for example, if her husband became terminally ill and asked her to help him die, would she? “If my husband found himself diagnosed with a crippling illness, from which he was going to die, if we had thought about it and discussed it and talked to doctors and so on . . .”

She paused. “Of course I would help him. Of course I would.”

When in office Ms Hewitt was sometimes characterised as aloof. On this issue she has found a deep empathy with people she has never met, such as the parents of the 23-year-old Daniel James. They helped him to travel to Switzerland to die last year after he was paralysed in a rugby accident.

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