Killing, it seems, is an idea whose time has come. Hot on the heels of the Inglis and Gilderdale cases, we have seen veritable death-fest. The celebrities have been wheeled out in force. Sir Terry Hatchett this morning called for suicide tribunals, and will tonight deliver his Richard Dimbleby Lecture ‘Shaking Hands with Death’ from – Dr No kids you not – The Royal College of Physicians. Only last week, Martin Amis – whose bad breath is said to be capable of assisting suicide at twenty paces – warned of a ‘silver tsunami’, and a need for euthanasia booths on every street corner.
Meanwhile, campaign group Dignity in Dying – whose slogan ‘Your life, your choice’ appears to be backing the wrong horse – have jumped on the band-wagon, and ramped up their calls for changes in the law to allow assisted suicide and euthanasia. North of the Border, MSP Margo Macdonald last month launched her End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill, complete with safeguards including a requirement to be registered with a Scots GP for 18 months – presumably to prevent a Gretna Green style flood of suicide punters from the rest of the UK. Even the GMC joined in the party – only last week, they said it was OK for doctors to bump off elderly patients, as long as you don’t get caught at the time.
Last week we had the red-tops falling over each other in their praise for the mothers who kill ‘with love in their hearts’. And tonight, we had Panorama – whose cameras followed Gilderdale for almost a year – telling it from the heart. It was at times a most moving programme.
But something rankled Dr No. Sure, there were tears held back, but for much of the time, Kay Gilderdale seemed almost too composed. At times, she even smiled while saying the most difficult things. Had – Dr No wondered – a hand been guiding her behind the scenes?
The Witch Doctor’s black cat is keen on conspiracy theories. Dr No and the Witch Doctor are more sceptical. But – if we piece together the long period of Panorama involvement, the composure, the clear story that was being told – then a none too welcome whiff of PR management begins to emerge.
Dr No’s compassion began to wobble, and his sympathy threatened to whither on the vine. Was there someone off camera and out of shot, guiding events? An experienced, media-savvy Machiavellian character of ill-gotten gains?
Someone like Max Clifford?
something seems a bit stinky. BBC luvvies (moved on from climate change )and writers chumming up to pass euthanasia. Very sinister. Switched off the Dimbley lecture. Luvvies hate anything ugly – death, dying. What do any of them know ? about anything ? Abortion on demand ( which was never meant to be) at one end of the life spectrum moving on to kill a granny / useless / old person.
But hey what do I know ? Just makes me very uneasy.
Anna – I think you do know – unlike a lot of other people who appear to be blinded by an emotional sandstorm, often of their own making. The problem here isn’t about 30 years of guilt for not killing granny, but creep. Once the door is opened, once the levee is breached, the ever-flowing water will erode at the edges of the breach, slowly but surely enlarging it, until one day a great torrent of Biddies and Gilberts are regularly flushed down the euthanasia drain.
Maybe not. But then again, maybe. Should for a moment the current absolute (an absoluteness already at risk since the DPP hinted that some cases of assisted suicide would not be prosecuted) restriction on assisted suicide and euthanasia be breached, then the bulwarks at the edges of breach will need to be of outstanding strength to ensure that no undue and unwanted enlargement of the breach should occur.
Dr No also watched the Dimbleby Lecture. He’s not quite sure whether it was Hatchett’s Lecture, because he didn’t give it, but he was there on the stage, wearing an outsize Thespian hat, tugging at his beard, nodding sagely at his own words, and generally adopting a God-like air, albeit a God with the Posterior Cortical Atrophy variant of Alzheimer’s disease. The luvvies in the audience pulled all the right faces in all the right order, and gave the obligatory standing ovation.
The normally conspiracy theory resistant Dr No is beginning to sense ever more strongly the possibility of orchestration at work here. By a spooky irony, the phrase Dr No opened his original post with “an idea whose time has come” came up in the lecture. Ideas “whose time have come” often imply an underlying (sorry – another cliché) groundswell of grass-root opinion. That is as may be (and there is certainly no shortage of grass-roots ready to raise a swell) but what strikes Dr No is the sheer volume of time and space being given over to cover the matter in the media. Panorama, The Today programme, The World at One, The Dimbleby Lecture, You and Yours – and that’s just the last 24 hours, and just the BBC.
Auric Goldfinger would have no doubt that this was clear evidence of enemy action. Perhaps the time has come to agree with him.