John Humphrys defends assisted dying

BBC Radio 4 Today presenter John Humphrys is to publish a book in which he will call for the legalisation of euthanasia. He told the Sunday Telegraph that his conviction that the existing UK law should be changed comes for his experience with his own father, George, who died in 2003 after many years' suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

"He had a ghastly death," recalls Humphrys. "Had he been able to, he would have died when my mother did. He never recovered from that and never got his life back. As a result, he set about trying to kill himself. This was regarded by the medical establishment as wrong, which I think was unacceptable. We can't know what people want to do on this matter; only the people themselves know."

Of the book, The Welcome Visitor, which Humphrys is co-writing with his London-based general practitioner, Dr Sarah Jarvis, he says: "We need to look again at the way we approach death. We regard it as something unwelcome or unexpected when, actually, it is a natural part of life.

"Our lives are based on the assumption that we should in some way cheat it and in that way we have a poorer death. Everything has changed on this front in a very short space of time. Every decade people are living an extra couple of years."

He adds: "The problem is that anyone who advances this argument or makes the ghastly trip to Switzerland is attacked for giving up or losing hope, but we don't have the right to make that assumption of other people. It has been decreed that we should not be in control of our deaths, but I believe we should be in control of the way we die." ·