John Humphrys seems to be a man haunted by death. Perhaps it is one reason
why, at the age of 65, he still works at a frenetic rate, waking up at two
minutes to four in the morning to present BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today
programme.
We meet when he has already been up for almost the length of a normal working
day (in other words, late morning) at his substantial home next to one of
London’s prettier parks. Humphrys insists that we talk to each other on the
wooden bench outside his front door: he is a sun worshipper (with another
home in Greece) and it’s a beautiful spring day.
The prime ministers whom Humphrys interviews tend to look clapped-out after
only a few years in the job; how long has he managed to survive in the Today
hot seat? “Twenty-two years. It’s longer than anybody by a mile.”
Even longer than Brian Redhead, the programme’s previous grand inquisitor?
“Brian had done 14 years when he died.”
Curious, isn’t it, that he should raise unprompted the fact that his former
colleague was all but carried out of the studio, when he was just 62. How
does Humphrys bear up under the strain? “It sounds absurd, but I feel as
fresh as I have ever been. I’m fit. And I go to bed early. I’m usually
asleep by 10 past nine.”
Presumably that part of the regime also fits in well with the fact that, for
half of every week, Humphrys shares his home with an eight-year-old boy, his
son from his former relationship with Valerie Sanderson, the BBC presenter.
The father-son axis is, in a way, the reason for Humphrys’s latest book, a
personal treatise in support of euthanasia – or, as he terms it, “assisted
suicide”.
His own father lost his sight as a 12-year-old but was immensely stubborn and
self-reliant, managing to support a family of five children from his
earnings as a French polisher. In his final decade he was afflicted by
dementia. According to Humphrys, those last years were a living hell from
which his father should have been spared.
“I first wrote about my father’s death in an article for The Sunday Times. I’d
been a journalist by then for 45 years and I’d never written anything which
had an impact like that. I got over a thousand letters. I’ve still got them
here. Yet there are up to 800,000 people in the UK with Alzheimer’s, with
maybe two or three more loved ones affected by their condition. So that’s a
couple of million people, at a conservative estimate, that are hugely
affected in this way.”
The issue of assisted suicide is becoming politically very active. Last week
Patricia Hewitt, the former health secretary, declared that she was putting
down an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill that would prohibit
people being prosecuted for taking relatives abroad for assisted suicides.
So isn’t it slightly surprising that the BBC should have countenanced its
star current affairs presenter publishing what amounts to a manifesto in
favour of one side of the debate?
“I’ve never taken a position like this before. I consulted the BBC, obviously.
Quite what I’d have done if they’d said I couldn’t write the book, I don’t
know – consider resigning, I suppose. Anyway, I don’t get involved in this
subject on the programme any more. We had a debate on it the other day and I
volunteered not to take part. They probably would have ordered me not to,
but I volunteered.”
Humphrys ends the book with the self-lacerating statement that he can “never
forgive myself” for not being able to “help” his father die, having heard
the old man’s repeated cries of anguish in the grim confines of a former
Victorian mental hospital. So why didn’t he kill his father? “I absolutely
couldn’t have brought myself to do it, I suppose. I’d have been scared, if
I’d seriously thought about it, which I didn’t. I’d have been scared of the
consequences.”
Nothing more than that? Humphrys instantly picks up on the implication of the
question: that we have an innate or inbred moral sense which prevents us
from killing our parents (or indeed anyone else).
“Would I have felt that I had done something that was terribly morally wrong?
No, the important word is ‘helped’ to kill him. Helped. He wanted to kill
himself, of that I have not the slightest doubt at all. He didn’t need to
say it. I don’t cry very often, but in that unspeakably ghastly mental
institution in Cardiff, which we used to call the loony bin, he was
desperate. He was a very, very strong man, with enormous resources, and
brave – and he was terrified of continuing to live.”
Humphrys’s father never asked his son to help him die, so he can’t know for
sure. I tell him that when my sister, Thomasina, was in the final hours of
her life, riddled with cancer, I wanted the doctor to end her suffering. Yet
afterwards I realised that what I had wanted him to put an end to was my own
distress at her condition.
“Yes, all of that goes through one’s head. The honest answer is, of course,
that I don’t know. But it was absolutely clear that the way he was drinking
was suicidal. It was more than a bottle of whisky a day. And not eating.”
Enough of these grim recollections for the moment. I try to provoke him by
suggesting he’s getting softer on politicians in the maturity of his years.
“No, absolutely not. My tone is different. My approach is different. There
was a time, certainly at the very start, when I wanted to prove I had big
balls and I showed off a bit. I recognise that now.”
He says he was forced to grow out of it and he recalls with remorse a
“dreadful” interview with John Hume, the Northern Irish politician, in 1993.
Humphrys con-fesses that he treated Hume “appallingly – I was very rude to
him and got angry and the audience hated it”. Quite rightly, too, he says.
“But I think I learnt from that. I try now not to be rude – I don’t think I
am rude. I try not to lose my temper – I don’t
think I do. But I don’t get any softer. I am, I hope, as forensic as one can
be on a programme like Today and as persistent on the things that matter.”
Does he ever feel underappreciated by the BBC? Because I’ve often seen rather
odd references to him by BBC panjandrums. “What sort?” he says, instantly
alert. “Well, you know,” I say airily, “Humphrys is a bit of a problem, that
sort of thing.”
This triggers a stream of consciousness featuring Mark Thompson, the BBC
director-general, and Charles Moore, the former Telegraph editor, whom he
declares “bonk-ers” for not paying his licence fee in protest at the
continued employment of the offensive Jonathan Ross: “Charles, do you want
the BBC to continue or not? And of course he does, because he knows it’s one
of the last surviving civilising influences in the country. So to put it in
jeopardy because of a campaign – worthy or not – [about] Jonathan Ross is
utterly barking.”
Yes, but what about his own significance to the BBC’s survival? “If I were
somebody like Mark Thompson and I saw somebody like Humphrys getting up the
noses of politicians whose approval is necessary for the survival of the
BBC, I think I might occasionally want to say: won’t somebody rid me of this
troublesome . . .
“Which is not to say – and it really is not to say – that they make my life
hard. It’s one of the great attributes of the BBC, actually. I’ve never,
even at the most awful time, I’ve never been asked to go easy on anybody.
You know: can you just turn it down a little bit?” That’s clear then. Now
back to his book and to whether or not euthanasia should be legalised. He is
outraged at the fudge by the director of public prosecutions, who has
repeatedly decided not to prosecute people suspected of helping a family
member to join the one-way traffic from Britain to the Dignitas suicide
clinic in Switzerland: “Surely nobody can defend a system where you are
allowed to do that, effectively with the blessing of the state: assisted
suicide is illegal, but wink wink, you can go and do it and we won’t
prosecute – if you’ve got the resources.
“Look at the kind of people who have done it: educated middle-class people.
The state cannot say to someone, yeah, look, if you really want to end your
life – for reasons that we can perfectly understand, as the last few months
are going to be torture – but only some of you can do that, because if
you’re the little old lady who’s living on a pension or who hasn’t got any
family, she’d love to do it but she can’t. That’s wrong. That’s offensive.”
I suggest to Humphrys that the current situation might be regarded by cautious
legislators as a useful hypocrisy: the truly determined are able to go to
Switzerland, rather as Irish women fly to the UK to have abortions.
This provokes an impassioned – and impressive – peroration: “It’s not the same
at all! The Irish women who want abortions are young and healthy. They can
easily hop on a plane, come over here and do it. But picture an old lady,
poor, a spinster, over 70, she’s got no one to help her. She would love to
avail herself of what Dignitas provides. Why in God’s name should she be
denied that, if we accept that others can do it?
“That is the ultimate hypocrisy. We are penalising that old lady. We are
saying to her: you are worthy of less of our consideration, our charity and
our concern than the middle-class person who can afford to do it. It’s just
wrong. You know it’s wrong.”
Humphrys’s anger is genuine and in it one can still see the young Welshman who
left school at 15 and whose teeth were set on edge by the comfortable
Oxbridge salon which the BBC’s management must have resembled when he
started at the corporation. Humphrys isn’t a class warrior exactly, but his
passionate identification with what he sees as the social underdog – even in
death – clearly informs a lot of his hostility to the current legal quagmire.
Also, of course, Humphrys has his own family’s particular experiences to bring
to bear on the issue and they extend beyond the death of his father.
“I can remember with my wife, her mother developing Alzheimer’s and it was
ghastly. Her mother lived briefly with the family when she was completely
potty. It imposed a terrible strain on the family; they hated it.”
What Humphrys appears to be describing here is not so much a case in which the
individual wants to be put out of her misery, but in which it seems to her
family that they would all be better off if she were dead: the sort of
argument that can lead down the slippery slope to involuntary euthanasia. At
bottom, however, Humphrys’s argument for assisted suicide is that it would
allow the individual the right to choose the time of his or her death and
that a doctor should assist in the process.
Humphrys claims that this, in essence, is what was offered to his wife, Edna,
a former nurse who was found to have cancer after the couple split up in the
late 1980s. She died in 1997. “The interesting thing was that, in her case,
she’d been in the medical profession herself and she came away from the
hospital, after she’d had the final diagnosis, with a bloody great bottle of
dia-morphine. And they said to her, if you need a dose, you know how many
mils it is, you could dose yourself . . . now that was the right thing to
do, offering her the ability to kill herself, since she was a sophisticated
woman, medically educated.”
In fact, she didn’t use this “loaded revolver”, as he calls it, and had “some
very good months” remaining. Similarly in Oregon, where assisted suicide is
legal, “they give them the prescription and most people don’t even go and
get that prescription filled, but they’ve got it there – and, God knows, I’d
want that”. Really? “If someone told me tomorrow, ‘You’ve got motor neu-rone
disease’, my instinct would be to think: how, sooner or later, do I arrange
to get myself killed? I don’t want to suffer.”
Isn’t he obsessed by death? “No! No! No!” “You strike me as someone who is
actually very frightened of it,” I persist.
“No, because I don’t believe anything is going to come after it. I hate the
thought of death – and having an eight-year-old son, as I do, does make a
difference, funnily enough. But, no, I’m certainly not obsessed. I’m
terrified of people close to me dying: that’s the thing. But you have to be
very stupid not to think about death, haven’t you?”
Perhaps it’s appropriate to leave the great inquisitor asking the final
question.
The Welcome Visitor by John Humphrys will be published on April 2
