Dame Prue Leith: living and dying well
Dame Prue Leith is a writer, broadcaster, entrepreneur and campaigner who has become one of the most recognisable faces on British television. As part of our Women in Westminster series, we sat down with Dame Prue to talk about both living and dying well
Any discussion with Dame Prue Leith moves at a breathless pace. Over the course of our sit-down conversation, we travel from apartheid-era South Africa to the Sorbonne in the early 1960s, and on to her current campaign for the right to a dignified death in later life.
It feels that Leith has crammed the contents of several lifetimes into one. Born in South Africa, Leith tells us that her upbringing was in many respects one of privilege. However, she adds that history teaches us that privilege can sometimes be an enabler for driving change rather than an obstacle to it.
“It's interesting how often female heroes come from the educated middle classes or upper classes,” she tells us. “Because they're the people who had the time and the leisure and the education to realise how they could change things.”
She points to the example provided by her own mother, South African actor Margaret Inglis. Leith has clear memories of her, along with other middle-class women, actively protesting against the inequities of the apartheid state.
“I remember my mother coming home one day and she was wearing a black coat,” she remembers. “It was winter, and it was covered in egg yolk because she'd been on the town hall steps and pro-apartheid morons have been throwing eggs at them.”
For any interviewer, getting Leith to open up is not difficult. She clearly relishes recounting elements of what is, by any standards, a remarkable life.
“First of all, I'm a complete blabbermouth,” she laughs. “I'll tell anybody anything. I think I embarrass my family sometimes. I remember when I wrote my most recent book, and I gave a copy to my son. He said, ' Oh my God, mum, not more revelations, please’.”
It is that openness, and Leith’s ability to connect with different audiences, that has led to her becoming one of the best-known broadcasters in the UK. You get the sense that for Leith, speaking out is itself an act of liberation. That was not always the case. During her childhood in South Africa, she remembers that there were many conversational topics that were firmly off limits.
“When I was young, there were things you didn't talk about at dinner. You didn’t talk about politics. You didn't talk about sex. You didn't talk about money. You didn't talk about food,” she says. “God knows what you did talk about. Those are the interesting things. There's nothing left.”
Leith’s willingness to step into areas where conversations may previously have been off-limits is a quality that has encouraged the broadcaster to speak out in recent years in support of assisted dying. She is a patron of Dignity in Dying, an organisation campaigning to allow everyone the right to a good death. It is a cause that she became passionate about after watching her brother, David, suffering with terminal bone cancer on a hospital ward.
“Sometimes he would be begging, crying, screaming,” she recalls. “I remember once him absolutely yelping. It's very unpleasant for everybody else in the ward. And it's horrible for the nurses, and they're powerless to do anything about it.”
That experience led to Leith joining other voices in pressing for a change to the law to allow terminally ill people more choice at the end of their lives.
Leith is now 86. I ask her whether her own death is something she contemplates more as she gets older.
“Oh, of course,” she says. “Everybody does. I don't fear death. I certainly don't welcome it. You know, I don't want to die, but I do want to be able to die if I find life intolerable.”
That option is currently not available to Leith or indeed to anyone else seeking choice at the end of their lives. Recent legislation to allow assisted dying failed to clear the House of Lords after some peers used procedural devices to slow its progression. Leith tells us that she is angry at the way that happened, describing the behaviour of some peers as “disgraceful.”
“It actually brings the House of Lords into disrepute,” she says. “The reason that a bill goes to the Lords is that they're supposed to scrutinise it and improve it. They are not meant to bury it under over a thousand amendments. They let the side down. But it's coming back, and I think it might get through. It's time.”
Leith remains optimistic that the weight of public support behind a change to the law means that it will eventually happen. She tells us that such a change is desperately needed, despite the efforts of the bill’s opponents, who include her own son, Reform MP Danny Kruger.
“He really leads the anti-assisted dying crowd, which is a bit ironic,” she tells us. “But I have got him to admit that if it's legal, he will hold my hand when my time comes. He said, if it's illegal, and I still do it, he'll have to look the other way.”
That exchange typifies Leith. She is a woman who has spent a lifetime refusing to avoid difficult conversations. Whether campaigning for better school food or for greater choice at the end of life, her instinct is always to confront difficult subjects honestly and openly.
“Nearly everything that I've got involved with has been because of personal experience,” she says. “Just feeling, ‘This is wrong, somebody should do something about it.’ And because I'm a bossy woman, it tends to occur to me that I could do something about it.”
